FakeUgly

By its very nature, the work of American photographer David LaChapelle invites controversy. One observer at New York magazine called LaChapelle “the Fellini of photography,” while another of the same periodical’s writers suggested, “David LaChapelle should have his artistic license suspended.”

David LaChapelle born March 11, 1963 in Fairfield, Connecticut is a amazing photographer and video/commercial/film director who works in the fields of fashion, advertising, and fine art photography, and is known for his surreal and quite humorous style.

When asked to describe his style David LaChapelle came back with “escapist fantasies, celebratory, beautiful” This is offcourse hard to disagree with.

LaChapelle’s work continues to be inspired by everything from art history to street culture, creating both a record and mirror of all facets of popular culture today. He is quite simply the only photographic artist currently working in the world today whose work has transcended the fashion and celebrity magazine context it was made for, and has been enshrined by the notoriously discerning and fickle contemporary art intelligentsia.

“David LaChapelle is a photographer who tends to create his own visionary world, rather than reproduce what’s visible in the world. …Performance obliterates banality, just like Drew Barrymore’s breasts can become grapefruit halves with a cherry; we hear the distant echoes of Lewis Carroll; eat me, drink me, big becomes small; the Tour Eiffel becomes a phallus (and vice versa), (meaning and lack of meaning mingle and compare.) This is the flow of the metropolis, of the great city life, fixed within its peremptory unreality substituting the known realities of camera shots.” - Renato Nicolini, catalog excerpt.

Which only goes to prove that when it comes to discussing commercial fantasy photography, one shouldn’t try to say too much.