The real America gone mad

"He's the Zeitgeist photographer of the '90s," says American Photo editor, and LaChapelle fan, David Schonauer. "He captured the moment not only stylistically, with his color and by celebrating trash culture, but also technologically with his use of computers. It just looked right."

LaChapelle's pronounced use of special digitized effects caused a stir two years ago when actress Mira Sorvino took public exception to the way he morphed her image, photographed for an Allure magazine spread, into a simulacrum of Joan Crawford (adding period clothing, makeup and a young Christina stand-in.) The dust-up prompted yet another media debate over the "reality" of photography and caused LaChapelle to hire a publicist to counter what he considered cheap shots, which began appearing in the New York tabloids. "It was all very Joan Crawford," he says now of the incident, which faded away without the threatened lawsuit. (The photo in question is not in the new book.)

LaChapelle says that if there is one misconception about what he does it is how much his pictures depend on computerized special effects. Certainly the work's strongest virtues -- set designs, locations, lighting, clothing, make-up and casting -- all come from the fervid brain and considerable skills of the photographer and his associates. (LaChapelle is exceptional for the public credit he gives his production team, a group that has worked with him for years.) And the pictures that work best in "Hotel LaChapelle" have the tang of real life included in the mix. Even so, with his every photo buffed to a bright candy-colored gloss, LaChapelle's current work would not be possible without the computer-enhanced color of the modern printing process.

Hot magazine photographers now become art stars with little fuss, and LaChapelle is no exception, having mounted shows at New York's Staley-Wise and Tony Shafrazi Galleries. The favored critical term given his work is "surrealist," an obvious tag that he, rightfully, rejects. Asked if he is a satirist, LaChapelle says he prefers to think of himself as a documentarian. "Not in the traditional sense, in that I'm creating these things. But I do feel these are [portraits of] people making up our world today." If his favorite subjects -- Madonna, Leonardo DiCaprio, Marilyn Manson, Devon Aoki, Mark Wahlberg -- lack a certain cultural gravitas, his work is not confined by their pop parameters. LaChapelle's photography is all flesh and blood; extravagantly immediate. His photos connect more to the visceral pleasures and terrors of the theater, and its origins in ancient religious sacrifice, than to the rather abstracted cerebral feelings usually aroused by film.

LaChapelle's portraits do not celebrate celebrity so much as devour it. Of course, celebrity consumed returns as an indelible imago - a god ready to be eaten again and again. LaChapelle is clearly in touch with how this active process of deification works today. "Pictures are an escape. They should be bigger than life. In the same way, celebrities provide an escape from the mundane. They are photographed so we can worship them -- so they are worthy of our worship." He speaks the last sentence in a camp-reverent tone which does not undercut its essential truth. No photographer's work has better exposed that orgiastic extremity of fame.

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