Photographer David LaChapelle on fame, fantasy and #FreeBritney

As New York Fashion Week opens, on September 9, so does an exhibition likely to pique the front row’s interest. Staged over six floors at Fotografiska in Manhattan, its stars include a 17-year-old Britney Spears clutching a Teletubby and a naked Lil’ Kim, stencilled with Louis Vuitton monograms. Lady Gaga appears as a cyborg; Kanye West pops up in a crown of thorns. Kim Kardashian is there, her right hand raised in a pose borrowed from Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, in a promotional shot for her KKW make-up line.

The photographer on show is, of course, David LaChapelle, a man whose high gloss, sometimes controversial aesthetic — think Botticelli went to Vegas — is as recognisable today as when he injected an outrageous new energy into photography in the ’90s and noughties. His images were lavish, surreal, and often with a twisted eroticism — a portrait sees David Bowie tweaking the nipple of a nude, skeletal, David Bowie-esque figure in a room littered with scalpels. He furthered celebrity portraiture as pop cultural moment decades before Kim Kardashian broke the internet with a photograph of a champagne glass balanced on her bottom.

Britney’s parents cooked for us, and everybody was nice, but something was weird. She was never super enthusiastic — it was a job of work for her

Now 59, LaChapelle has been semi-retired since he moved to a former nudist colony in a remote part of Hawaii, where he runs an organic farm and lives off-grid using solar power, and focuses on his own art work. But he keeps getting lured back. He has recently shot Lizzo for Rolling Stone, and Elton John for his farewell tour. He does occasional commercial gigs to fund his personal work: “There’s no shame in doing commercial work to support yourself,” he says, over Zoom from a hotel in LA. (He is, inevitably, on the road for a job again.) Then he delivers a 10-minute monologue about packaged fruit company Dole sending Georgia O’Keeffe to Hawaii in 1939 to paint pineapples.

In an era of image overload — in which celebrity culture seems, at times, to have swallowed the news agenda — LaChapelle’s work is increasingly finding favour with critics. In 2017, the New Yorker wrote that when he moved to Hawaii he had been “derided in some quarters as a vapid commercialist”. However in retrospect his work appears to question fame, and materialism, as much as it celebrates it.

He is also finding a new audience within the Gen-Z Y2K revival crowd. He did, after all, direct Christina Aguilera’s 2002 “Dirrty” video, a seminal noughties-style moment of washboard abs, and ultra low-cut bum-baring chaps. Perhaps surprisingly, for one of the era’s image architects, he tells me he wasn’t aware of the Y2K revival, though he adds with a shake of his head that he can believe it: “We’re nostalgic for things that haven’t even happened yet. I can’t keep up with all the micro trends; I’m sure early Yeezys will probably have a big comeback soon as vintage.” It all ties into what he sees as a decline of culture, thanks to social media: “Everything’s moving faster. People have really short attention spans and also they need new information all the time,” he says.

Though his celebrity work drop-kicked open myriad doors, he feels that it also created misconceptions about him. He says, even as a child, he was an obsessive Richard Avedon fan. “I knew from a very young age, what was tacky and what wasn’t. I think you have to understand what is something that’s very tasteful, in order to do something that’s the opposite.” He came of age in New York City, where Andy Warhol gave him his first job as an in-house photographer at Interview magazine in the 1980s — he found Americana and kitsch “exotic” and wanted to make commentary about it. “I think a lot of people in fashion thought that’s what I loved. I did love it, in a certain way, but I didn’t want to live there.”

The new exhibition shows breadth. It spans 40 years, starting with 1980s work inspired by the Aids crisis, moving through portraits of Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Madonna, Hillary Clinton and more, and landing in Hawaii with his recent personal work, much of which is inspired by Christianity. One of his favourite images in the show is “Stairway to Paradise”, a 2019 shot featuring nude models lying recumbent on a staircase he built behind his cabin, and an Angel Gabriel-type with a halo in the foreground.

From the glossy naked limbs, to the lavish composition, the style feels unmistakably him, though its sincerity might surprise casual LaChapelle observers. He is a life-long Catholic, though he didn’t talk about it in the early part of his career: “I guess because it was so uncool . . . let’s be real. There’s not a big demand for, like, art that depicts Christianity.”

Interviewing LaChapelle is a wild ride. He hurtles from one subject to the next, speaking at such length that it is difficult to interject with clarifying follow up questions, for instance during 17 eye-opening minutes on Britney Spears. He is, he says “the photographer that has photographed her most in her life”.

Last year, the singer was released from a conservatorship, after she accused her family and management of abuse; the legal battle led to the founding of the #FreeBritney movement. LaChapelle says that even before he heard of it he had spoken out about “a lot of things happening that I didn’t agree with”. For example he spent about a week with the family for that first, controversial Rolling Stone cover, released in 1999, in which Spears was photographed at 17, looking overtly Lolita-ish in her childhood bedroom. It was shot in her family home, a place filled with her pageant trophies.

“Her parents cooked for us, and everybody was nice, but something was weird. She was never super enthusiastic — it was a job of work for her. They put her to work as a pageant girl. It just all happened to her. It wasn’t her dream and I think at a certain point it just got to her a lot.”

I try to interrupt him repeatedly during this monologue, to ask whether he ever felt complicit, or that he should have spoken up sooner, but he keeps on talking about shoots that were almost cancelled; how bizarre it was that a person could have a career they did not want, speaking with slight detachment.

His celebrity subjects have also included Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston, who fell victim to the dark side of fame. Hopefully pop culture is heading to a better place? Actually, he says, he sees nothing at all encouraging. He decries the distractions of selfie culture and “ridiculous reality shows that just show people with private jets”, which sounds a little at odds with the fact that he shot the Kardashian family’s 2013 Christmas card.

But he says that his intention is not to lionise celebrities; he claims that even when he is putting them in Christ-like positions he is not saying that they are today’s icons. Moreover, he has a general interest in documenting “the people that interest the world”. Britney, Kim Kardashian and Kanye are “very nice people”, he says. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m buying what they are selling.”

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