Fred Tomaselli

Social satirists are rarely rewarded as richly as LaChapelle, especially by Madison Avenue. But while his advertising work does not necessarily exhibit the deviant daring of his editorial efforts, his work in both areas is remarkably consistent in tone. As visual culture has shifted from the printed page to the electronic screen in the past decade, LaChapelle’s work proves the page can still pack a punch. Bucking a design trend that’s reduced most magazine photos to Band-Aid proportions, his pictures demand to be run big.

LaChapelle, like Annie Liebovitz 20 years before, redefined the celebrity portrait. But Liebovitz colluded with her star subjects to create (with warm lighting and informal poses) a manipulative and ultimately cynical mimicry of naturalness. LaChapelle has a manifestly different agenda; nothing is natural in his pictures, least of all his celebrity sitters. His photo subjects’ artifice (and inanity) is worn as a badge of pride, and LaChapelle’s celebrity portraits venerate — rather than disguise — the manipulative nature of all images. Life is a movie, and “Anytime you aim a light,” he says, “you change reality.”

Gay and out since his teens, LaChapelle uses an iconography drawn more from the works of Paul Cadmus and William Burroughs than of Edward Weston and Edward Steichen. In a nation where the Village People’s “YMCA” has become a beloved sing-along at sporting events, the acceptance of LaChapelle’s work is another large indicator of the merging of gay cultural sensibilities with the mainstream.

Born in a picturesque corner of Connecticut, LaChapelle moved at age 12 to North Carolina. “It was a boom town,” he says. “Strip-mall culture, housing developments going up almost overnight. It introduced me to the scary and banal landscape that America is.” He has written that he was “tormented at school,” explaining in an Advocate interview, “I looked weird; I acted weird; and I wore my sexuality on my sleeve.” His parents accepted who he was and, he says, did much to protect him from the harsh Bible Belt climate.

In 1978, at 15, he moved on his own to New York and landed a job bussing tables at Studio 54, then in its hedonistic heyday.

“I loved seeing people, celebrities, behaving outrageously,” he says of that time. “I liked the colorfulness and strangeness of the ’70s.”

LaChapelle did a quick stint at art school in North Carolina in the early ’80s, but was back in New York by 1984 when, after meeting Andy Warhol at a Psychedelic Furs concert, he got his first photo job shooting pictures for Interview magazine. “The one thing I learned working at Interview — Andy would say, ‘Do whatever you want. Just make sure everybody looks good.’” Taking the wisdom to heart, LaChapelle quickly became a downtown darling, shooting for European and the smaller fashion magazines.

In an Adweek interview, he credits a 1994 Details assignment, photos of up-and-coming rock musicians with their parents, with clarifying his style. “It was a breakthrough … These pictures were the real America gone mad.”

“For years,” he says now, “all I wanted was to make enough money shooting pictures to survive in New York. I never expected this.” “This” began with the 1996 publication of “LaChapelle Land.” “It was the first time people got to see the range and scope of the work I’d been doing, finally brought together in one place.”

A gorgeous color production set in an eye-catching box, the book gave LaChapelle currency in idea-starved agency art departments everywhere. His ’96 MTV commercial depicting elderly imitators of Madonna and Courtney Love in a “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” scenario helped turn the buzz into a roar.

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