Photographer LaChapelle Recasts Michael Jackson as a Misunderstood Martyr

Image by ★ Nisa Yeh ★ via Flickr

Updated

Photographer David LaChapelle recasts Michael Jackson as a misunderstood martyr

The recent photos made by a pop art photographer David LaChapelle feature Michael Jackson.

The photographer whose previous work had been garish and over-sexualized said he was burnt out after many years of work with celebrities and spent the last 5 years in a remote part of Hawaii seeking the lost Paradise. He says that the retreat saved his life.

David LaChapelle. “Archangel Michael: And No Message Could Have Been Any Clearer.” 2009. On display at Paul Kasmin Gallery, NYC. http://www.complex.com/blogs/2010/07/14/exhibit-see-david-lachapelles-american-jesus/

It also moved him to create a series of photographs portraying Michael Jackson as a misunderstood angel and martyr. The motifs he is using are the religious ones. LaChapelle says he wants to talk in a different language and try to get people to see beauty.

Story by Laura Allsop for CNN

December 23, 2010

LaChapelle is synonymous with contemporary pop culture.

But after two decades of photographing the brightest stars in entertainment and fashion, LaChapelle was burnt out, so he made the decision to retreat to a remote part of Maui, in Hawaii.

“I was pretty much working myself like crazy and wasn’t taking care of myself, so (coming) here has really sort of saved my life in a way,” he told CNN.

That was nearly five years ago, and the work he has made since is, fittingly, based around the theme of salvation, melding religious symbolism and Renaissance art motifs.

Religious symbolism and art historical references ranging from Botticelli to Michelangelo abound in this new work.

LaChapelle’s latest work recasts Michael Jackson as a misunderstood martyr

Some critics have taken offence at his imagery. To LaChapelle, though, it is beautiful — and, he says, beauty can be a useful tool for communication.

“Beauty draws people in whereas (ugliness) repels them, and aggressive imagery repels them, and to document things straight on the nose — that’s the job of a photojournalist. That’s not my job,” he said.

These days, though, LaChapelle’s work is fed by the natural environment, reflecting his spiritual regeneration. Many of his images are based around the theme of paradise regained with Maui’s lush rainforest recast as an Edenic landscape where lost souls can find redemption.

Serious themes such as America’s dangerous obsession with consumerism and the plundering of Africa are explored in his recent work, but interpreted in a signature style that doesn’t shy away from bright colors or well-known faces.

This idea of Paradise Regained or Paradise Found — I think we all had enough of Paradise Lost –David LaChapelle

“What I try to do is get (people) to see it with beauty,” he continued.

The full text is here: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/12/23/lachapelles.paradise.hawaii/index.html

Olga has sent us more about David LaChapelle:

David LaChapelle pays tribute to Michael Jackson with a new image portrait that shows the late King of Pop as a modern-day martyr.

• “I don’t think he was capable of hurting anyone. I think there’s something really biblical about what happened,” explains David LaChapelle of Michael Jackson’s life and pedophilia accusations.

• “His lyrics are so naive and so beautiful. It’s one of the most epic stories of our time, to go from such heights to such depths. He’s a modern-day martyr.”
  

http://nessymon.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/michaeljackson-lachapelle.jpg

American Jesus: Archangel Michael Jackson

The fan community was quick to appreciate LaChapelle’s words – here are some of the quotes from their forum:

• • Spider-man: Nice to know not only the fan community realizes the depth and impact of the allegations and the critique it makes of society.

• • Powerful_mind: “What is his “demons”? The words “demons” could be used to describe all the crap that followed Michael and the things he had to deal with all of his adult life be it from his own doing or people who were just out to get him.  Things like the accusations, his dissatisfaction with his appearance, loneliness, stardom and all the problems it brings (paps, money grubbers), etc… Just everything that could have been viewed as a negative that never really ever went away.

• • Kay Hey: That painting is so beautiful. I can see where LaChapelle is coming from. Michael’s life has some Biblical dimensions to it. I think people are expected to learn some hard lessons from what happened to Michael, about not being judgmental and being more loving etc. The media has a lot to answer for. They’ve been willing participants in the sadly continuing charade to bring Michael down. But maybe the tide is starting to turn (high time too!) and scales are slowly dropping from folks’ eyes. I believe the truth will become crystal clear to everyone one day, preferably sooner than later  – because I’m impatient and would love to see that happen in my lifetime. http://www.mjjcommunity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=82869

Until yesterday I had never heard of David LaChapelle’s name. Now that I know the story of his spirit being reborn I find it amazing.  AMAZING.

To see a man like LaChapelle  – you need to have a look at his earlier photos to see what I mean –  REVALUATING HIS LIFE is like seeing a miracle happening right in front of your eyes.

Is the world taking a turn for simple but true values at last? Something Michael always kept telling us about?  Wasn’t it him who called out to each of us to look at ourselves in the mirror and make a change?

The highly successful LaChapelle did look at himself in the mirror and this is what happened to him after that:

David LaChapelle: post consumer man

David LaChapelle in Maui

by SPY_VONDEGA on AUGUST 8, 2009 –

A top fashion photographer who has grown sick and tired of the consumer society?

It sounds like a chef who has had enough of food.  But this is the story of David LaChapelle, darling of celebrity snappers, who moved from New York to an 18 acre off-grid retreat in Maui, where his bedroom is surrounded by kava, a tranquilizing plant that can inspire vivid dreams.

Several years ago, at the top of his profession and in constant demand, he realized, “I didn’t want to keep photographing fashion and celebrities….I really just walked away at the top of that editorial photography world… it was not a place that I wanted to continue to be in. Although it was great when I was in my 20s and early 30s, I wanted something different.”

“I always used to pray for a cabin in the woods with vegetarian food and a place to make my art,” David told a reporter recently, his trucker hat twisted sideways as he reached into a gallon-sized jar of honeycomb, harvested from a nearby beehive.

So David, who designed the sets for Elton John’s: Las Vegas show, completely removed himself from the universe that he had defined for decades. He went to its antithesis: Hawaii, more specifically, a farm on the island of Maui. “I decided I had said everything I needed to say, so I moved to the farm.” The property had been a small working farm and a nudist colony, and being the only private land in the middle of a state park—proved an allure for a man known for being at the center of the scene.

Burnt out after two decades in the world of fashion photography, where he became famous for his surreal portraits of pop stars like Pamela Anderson and Britney Spears, the Warhol disciple called it quits, left his homes in New York and Los Angeles and purchased the former nudist colony on the Wainapanapa coast, overgrown with bramble and teeming with mosquitoes. He spent much of his first three rainy months staring up at the sky in the Italian marble bathtub he had installed outside his cabin, nestled in a jungle of ferns, dragon-fruit plants and night-blooming jasmine.

The property is protected by a virtually impenetrable wall of hau bush — an invasive, woody plant — and morning glory. The main, plantation-style house, completely solar-powered, has five bedrooms, three bathrooms, a library, a caretaker’s apartment and workshop. Wood-louvered doors recycled from an old hotel make up the sides of the home, the kitchen was fitted with local eucalyptus and the armoires, library shelves and canopy beds were made of koa wood from the Big Island. Black pebbles coat the shower floors to simulate the texture of the black-sand beach nearby.

Outside a 30,000-gallon rain catchment barrel supplies water. Goats provide milk and fertilizer and frogs were provided to catch mosquitoes. There’s a waste, vegetable and bio-diesel refinery; a Mercedes painted in pink camouflage runs on vegetable oil.

“Very few people from the mainland would put up with all that — mosquitoes, rain, solar power — but it’s unquestionably the right place for him,” says Craig Maldonado, Mr. LaChapelle’s designer and project manager who lived on the property for two years during construction and oversaw 35 employees.

The King of Pop Art has left the building.
LaChapelle spent two decades recording pop culture, mirroring it back to itself before flipping the genre on its head and taking a shot from that angle. He was one of the most coveted editorial photographers, working constantly for the likes of Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone.

He couldn’t get enough, always with a camera in his hand, always working, working, working, wanting to take a shot of everyone, everyone, anyone who mattered. He wanted those shots to be the definition of the subject’s life, of their celebrity, to capture the glamour in a way that no other photo could, so that in decades, in centuries, someone studying this time period could look at that one photo and know who that person was.

There are a few reminders of the celebrities Mr. LaChapelle was known for photographing. An iron gate flanked by stone columns was a gift from Courtney Love. There’s a white grand piano that Lady Gaga played when she visited earlier this year. On a recent Friday, a winged Michael Jackson impersonator, flown in from Denver, practiced his moonwalk on the cliffs. (Mr. LaChapelle, who never photographed Mr. Jackson, said he wanted to depict the singer as a martyr crucified by the media.)

From Disco Diva to thoughtful intellectual

Mr. LaChapelle shot for Vogue and Vanity Fair and directed music videos and commercials for the likes of L’Oreal and Burger King. Celebrities were drawn to his irreverent style.

But a few years ago Mr. LaChapelle felt depleted. “I love glamour, I love fashion. But when that’s the sole purpose it becomes very limiting,” he says. He struggled to find magazines with an appetite for his increasingly apocalyptic imagery. (Among his darker works: “The House At The End of The World,” a photo depicting a woman and a baby in a hurricane-ravaged neighborhood, drew criticism when it was published coincidentally around the same time of Hurricane Katrina.)

At the same time, Mr. LaChapelle found himself growing disillusioned with New York, which he says “became ‘Sex in the City’ and about how many shoes you had.”

The next phase

When his manager Fred Torres suggested he start showing in galleries, he says Mr. LaChapelle reacted angrily. “He said, ‘Nobody wants to see me, they want to see Britney Spears,’” recalls Mr. Torres.

After his first 90 days in Hawaii, during which it rained constantly, Mr. LaChapelle called Mr. Torres and said he’d reconsidered. They flew to the Sistine Chapel the next week and set to work on his “Deluge” series — a collection of photos depicting floods in Las Vegas (the city of sin), a cathedral and a museum.

“Deluge: Musuem,” a photograph of four paintings sinking in a flooded museum, fetched $139,240 at Sotheby’s London auction in June, nearly three times the November sale prices of Mr. LaChapelle’s life-sized portraits of Madonna and Ms Spears.

Living in Hawaii has infused Mr. LaChapelle’s work with a new optimism. For a photograph last month, Mr. LaChapelle’s team constructed a raft from wooden planks and rusty barrels for a photo inspired by Theodore Gericault’s 1819 painting, “The Raft of Medusa,” now hanging in the Louvre. In Mr. LaChapelle’s version, the sinners he depicted in his Las Vegas flood have cobbled together a raft and, instead of going into the storm, they’re sailing into paradise, he says.
From Noah’s Ark back to LA.

“This is Noah’s ark,” he said, glancing around the great room in main house while a friend and Cirque du Soleil veteran named Jesus Villa did handstands on the kitchen counter. “It’s totally off the grid.”

“I had sort of said everything I wanted to say about popular culture,” he explains. He didn’t know when he’d come back, or if. But then, during his time away, he saw something in that mirror he had used for everyone else. He saw himself. It was a fresh angle, and, looking at it, he knew who that person was…And he couldn’t stay away for long.

You can’t escape his work. It’s everywhere. It is not confined to the walls of a gallery or the pages of a magazine. He directs commercials and music videos, creates ad campaigns for some of the world’s top brands. Remember that quasi-disturbing image of Christina Aguilera with her lips tied neatly shut with black string, tears cascading down her flawless cheeks, blue eyes upturned in pain? That was LaChapelle’s for a Declare Yourself campaign.

He directed a five-minute commercial for H&M, titled Romeo & Juliet. He has done campaigns for Motorola, Sky Vodka, Bebe, Phillip Morris, and more. And although the shots cross categories and defy characterization, they have one common thread: They are instantly identifiable as being taken by David LaChapelle.

This is exemplified by the Jesus is My Homeboy series, with  Jesus chillin’ at a Last Supper with a whole crew of new disciples, and as mediator between police and a lady of the night. The shots seem like a snippet of a rolling scene, a frame of an ongoing movie, which is the effect LaChapelle was going for. “There is a narrative tale in the photographs,” he says. “They’re not formalist in approach, they’re much more about a story being told.”

The Homeboy series clearly tries to answer the moral question: What would Jesus do? “[The images] are based on what the second coming would look like and the idea of the sublime,” he explains. “I’ve always been intrigued by that: taking an idea that has been depicted so many times by Old Masters throughout the history of art. I wanted to do a scene in color photography in a modern and urban setting. I wanted to answer the questions: What would it look like? What would it be like? I wanted to keep the authenticity without having it become ironic.”

Rather than reserve himself for the wealthy and for the elite, LaChapelle feels that Jesus would speak with and for the people in the streets, for the less fortunate and the downtrodden.

The island proved to be a pleasant retreat for LaChapelle, but it wasn’t long before he was approached by a gallery to create a series of original art. From that isolated patch of land, returning to L.A. was like stepping back into a different world. The resulting series, Deluge, reflects that contrast.

It is a modern-day retake on Michelangelo’s Deluge, Noah’s Flood in the Sistine Chapel. The series includes shots of a museum being filled up with water, a tragedy during which all the great artwork is destroyed. This is a reflection of the sheer excess that he feels pervades the art world. This was also reflected in his recent show, titled Insufficiency of all Things Attainable with a subtitle of Decadence. “I wanted to be very clear what the piece was about: excess and so much money, and so much conspicuous consumption. I don’t feel a person’s value is just their net worth.”

This ideal runs rampant through much of his recent work. Its origin can be traced back to Rize, the 2005 documentary about krumping, filmed in the streets of Los Angeles. He never had any interest in doing a documentary, but upon seeing these kids—downtrodden, less fortunate, people of the streets—who were making beautiful, dancing art, he couldn’t not do the documentary. “Rize was about some marginalized people who have no money, creating art from nothing. The true artist will find a way to create and the means to do it….The process [of creating Rize] and the end result were so full of hope,” he explains. “It had a hopeful and heroic message.” Against all odds, art will always find a way to flourish.

It was upon finishing that film, one of the best-reviewed of 2006, that LaChapelle’s whole attitude and outlook on life changed. He retreated to Hawaii and reevaluated his life, thinking about what was important.

The full text: http://www.off-grid.net/2009/08/08/david-lachapelle-in-maui/

~

UPDATED August 9, 2023

The above was written thirteen years ago. After seeing this short text suddenly becoming one of the most-read posts in this blog I realized that I was missing something and looked up what David LaChapelle says and thinks about Michael Jackson now.

Amazingly,  the renowned celebrity photographer David LaChapelle has turned into one of the staunchest defenders of Michael Jackson.

Not only did he grasp Michael’s true essence when he was alive and after his death portrayed him as a misunderstood martyr and American Jesus, but LaChapelle also did his research, read the court transcripts, and is familiar with the details of all bogus allegations against Michael.

Two years ago David LaChapelle went on the “ARE WE ON AIR” podcast and said:

“Michael was innocent…it’s not my opinion, it’s FACTS”

 “Michael was innocent…it’s not my opinion, it’s FACTS.” All you have to do – but no one would do it, because they don’t want to know – if you read the court transcripts, you could see for yourself  that it should have never gone into trial.”

More about it and the audio clip of LaChapelle speaking is here.

And in April 2019, in the midst of the frenzy over the ‘Leaving Neverland’ show, David LaChapelle posted very optimistic statements, already celebrating the victory of truth over greed and lies:

Photographer David LaChapelle defends Michael Jackson

April 11, 2019 5:12pm

Famed fashion photographer David LaChapelle is the latest celebrity to defend Michael Jackson.

LaChapelle, 56, shared his photograph of the pop star three times on Instagram on Thursday depicting Jackson as a weeping angel with his foot atop a red devil.

The photo of Michael Jackson David LaChapelle posted to his Instagram account Getty Images

In the caption for the first image, the artist wrote, “LIGHT OVER DARKNESS — KEEP THE FAITH — against greed and lies…truth out now!!!!”  This was followed by a zoomed in version of the same image with the caption, “PRAYERS ARE ANSWERED!!!!! — NO MESSAGE COULD HAVE BEEN ANY CLEARER — against greed and lies.” And a third of the same photo that reads, “TRUTH IS REVEALED! — VICTORY against greed and lies.”

The photographer’s defense of the musician comes as an apparent (and belated) response to the HBO documentary “Leaving Neverland”.

https://pagesix.com/2019/04/11/photographer-david-lachapelle-defends-michael-jackson/

Well, LaChapelle’s response is not necessarily “belated”. It may be prophetic.

Lighting the path to the future [David LaChapelle, 1998]