David LaChapelle - Photographer HARDtalk

Welcome to HARDtalk. I?m Stephen Sackur.

Today I?m in London's west end gallery district.

My guest is one of the most successful fashion

and celebrity photographers of the last 30 years, David LaChapelle.

At the height of his commercial success, he walked away from

the world of glamour to become a dedicated visual artist, producing

works like the ones you see here.

He's still provocative, he can still shock, but now,

does his work go deeper?

David LaChapelle, welcome to HARDtalk.

Thank you.

Here we are in London.

An exhibition of some of your recent work.

And there is not an A-list celebrity in sight.

There isn't any human flesh in sight.

Does this work suggest that you have fundamentally changed?

Well, I mean, I think as you get older you have

different chapters in your life.

You do change, hopefully, you grow, hopefully.

And your interests change.

I still love the things I did at that time.

Shooting celebrities and stuff was great.

People say, ?Oh, you burned out and quit?.

Actually, it was kind of more of an end of a love affair.

I was really in love with what I was doing, shooting celebrities.

It?s like...

That was a 20 year stint, a 20 year love affair.

But you are talking in the past tense.

It is a love affair that ended?

It did end.

I woke up and said, this has got to go.

It was great.

We had a great time and I love you.

But I have to check out now.

I will take you back to those years, I promise you.

But I want to stick right now with the work you have just done.

It's fascinating, because, when you look closer at it, you realise that

these panoramas, which appear to be industrial installations,

oil refineries, or indeed the gas stations, they are actually made up

of found objects, recycled objects, some of them as familiar

as a drinking straw or a battery, or a can of Coke.

Yes.

Is the message here that you are revolted

by our modern industrial society?

No, I'm not revolted by it.

I'm kind of in a bigger picture, and I don't want to get too existential,

but I look at it like we were the children in the 60s that they were

talking about when they started talking about overpopulation and

pollution loudly for the first time.

You know, there really was a movement about these issues.

And we inherited this system.

These are monuments to the industrial revolution,

and the gas station...

This one over here is a nuclear power plant.

We inherited this infrastructure that allowed us to populate

the planet.

You know, it's neither good nor bad.

It is just is, it happened, it is what it is.

And here we are now, at this precipice, and we all know that

change is upon us, great change is upon the planet, and that if you're

a conscious person living today, we know that the climate is changing

and that droughts are happening and that there are food riots already.

And this is already happening.

The ice caps are melting.

The things that they talked about just ten years ago,

five years ago, and earlier, are in full swing now, faster than they

thought they were going to happen.

Here's the thing, then, I wonder if there is, somewhere

in this work, an element of guilt?

Because for so long, and we're going to talk about it

in a minute, for so long you were associated with a high-gloss,

expensive world of celebrity, of high-end fashion, of glamour,

and, frankly, of also a sort of superficial throwaway society.

Do you feel guilty about that?

No.

It's funny you say that, because, you know, I took a plane here.

And we're sitting...

These pictures have a UV plexi protector on them, which is made

from the industrial revolution.

Everything here in this...

To feel guilty, I mean, I was brought up Catholic, so guilt

is part of my nature, you know?

But, about my photographs, I was always...

I look back and I started in galleries and working with

celebrities, and I was always trying to sneak in my own narratives.

And when you look at some of the pictures, some of them were

purely escapist and purely just for fun, and to kind of forget reality.

What told you that you were different from your peer group?

You had a pretty ordinary upbringing.

They told me. Who?

They told me I was different. They let me know, loud and clear.

You mean the kids at school?

The kids at school let me know that I was different.

I wanted to go to the birthday parties and stuff.

I wanted to hang out, be part of the group, but I wasn't.

I was excluded and bullied. Because...?

Because I was different, you know, and I was gay.

I knew I was gay when, I was having fantasies when I was a little kid.

And I didn't know what that was.

And then I asked my brother...

I remember this very well, because I was five and he was ten,

he's five years older.

I said, ?When I grow up, can I marry a boy??

And he said, ?No, that would make you a faggot.?

He did it really nicely, my brother wasn?t a bully,

but I knew that wasn?t a good word.

Around junior high, about seventh grade, things got really hard.

Eighth grade was impossible, and I dropped out of ninth great.

Eighth grade, I couldn't go to the cafeteria,

because milk cartons would come flying at me from every direction,

I would be sitting by myself because nobody would sit with me.

It was a big high school, 2,000 kids in Fairfield County,

and I still have nightmares...

Actually, the nightmares have ceased lately, I haven?t had them in years,

but for a while I had nightmares about being back about school,

and milk cartons kept flying at me.

So I would go to the art rooms, and I would make art.

And art and photography were your outlets.

Before too long, as a late teenager, you had New York City.

And you sort of found like-minded people.

Yes. Yes, they found me, it was Mecca.

It was paradise.

Coming from a place where everyone hated you for all kinds of reasons,

to then going to a place where people liked you for the same

reasons, and they, wow, you know...

You were dressing a certain way, or whatever.

You want to express yourself in your clothing, you know?

And your sexuality.

I'm going to be blunt with you.

Go ahead.

I'm going to ask you about how sexuality played into this

finding of yourself, and finding your artistic voice, as well.

Because you were a young gay man in New York, you have said that, for a

while, you even sold sexual favours in New York City to make ends meet

while you pursued your art.

Was sexuality always intrinsically wrapped up with your artistic voice?

That I can't say.

I don't think that...

I think that as much as anyone else's, I wasn't more...

Maybe I was a little bit more sexually active than other people,

but yet, I never...

My little friends when I was 15, I say little now, but we thought we

were so cool and adult, 15 years old in New York City.

And I'd wait outside the bath houses for them.

I hated the bath houses, I wouldn't go inside.

I thought it was like hell inside there, honestly,

because it was just dark and nasty, so I would wait outside,

and wait for my other 15-year-old friends, 16, whatever, to come out.

And, you know, they'd come in and tell me whatever

they did and stuff, and it was all funny, I guess, to them at the time,

and to me, as well.

But it just wasn't my thing.

And...

I did, I did what you said I did, yeah.

I couldn't hold down a job very well, I had a hard time being

employed.

What do you call it here?

I guess in England it?s called a rent boy, but for a few seasons,

I guess, I was...

It was a way to make money, and I guess it was also part

of the process of finding yourself.

It was different as well, because at the time there were bars you could

go to and you could meet people.

The older gentlemen would be there, and you could talk to them.

You could kind of size them up.

And I didn't like the ones that were just like...rude,

and just aggressive, so I would gravitate towards maybe

the more shy person.

So I had...

I got to paraphrase.

This is not something I recommend to anybody, because this is

a different world today.

The time that I was doing that was pre-AIDS, and also you can

meet people face-to-face.

Now, I have young friends and some of them go on the internet

and do this, and you don't know what you're walking into.

There's all kinds of situations.

You don't know the person.

You're not having any idea.

Not that it was safe then, but it was at least you getting

a feel for the person, you go to dinner, we'd have a talk.

Sometimes they were just really lonely, they want to talk about

Tennessee Williams, or, I don't know, Sam Shepard had a play on

Broadway then, they'd be surprised because a lot of the other kids

didn't know what he was or who he was, who Tennessee Williams was.

I could talk to them about that stuff.

And then I'd get a dinner out of it, which was really cool.

And then, you know, after being bullied in high school, being made

to feel like you're just so...

Not just ugly, but just everything wrong with you.

These people were like, kind of, they made you feel really special.

They made you feel really special for that moment.

I guess what is really intriguing about you...

And then you made some money, which is the bottom line.

And then you found some other ways to make money, and you made an awful

lot of money by becoming one of the most successful commercial

photographers of your generation.

I want to talk to you about the way you learned to work

with your subjects.

Because, you know, you are famous around the world

for portraits of beautiful women, for example, and I'm thinking now

about specifically someone like Angelina Jolie, where you did

a series of pictures with her.

Outdoor, with a horse, and they're very staged, they're

high-production glossy pictures.

And I wonder when you are doing something

like that, and trying to win the trust of a major celebrity to go

out and do these shots, how well do you have to get to know them?

Not really well at all.

It's funny, because I spoke a few times with Angelina on the phone,

and she was really excited about the shoot, and she had a lot of ideas,

and we came, and everybody left.

Like, her manager and publicist left us alone.

I think people trusted me because they could feel that I was

not there to make them look bad.

I believed in the aspirational idea of this beauty,

our stars being larger than life.

We think that, as human beings, we really appreciate the beauty of

another human being in any capacity.

At least, I do.

Have you ever pushed people into places they really were

uncomfortable going?

I think a few times.

It's uncomfortable, definitely, to be photographed,

in my kind of pictures.

Critics have accused you of being ultra-manipulative,

but also, particularly with women, of too often falling into

the sort of lazy, easy, commercial thing of sexualising, objectifying,

and that that is the weakness.

Your pictures are always striking, and they're memorable, but that is

the predictability of them.

I know what my intention is.

And I'm attracted to certain things and certain exaggerations,

and certain...

I'm attracted to lots of different things.

I'm also attracted to natural beauty, to heavy women,

and to breasts, and to men.

I don't think you just have to like one thing.

Those pictures of Amanda Lepore, who is a dear friend and

a transgendered woman who had her sex change at 17 as an emancipated

minor in Yonkers, New York.

And we became really good friends over photographs.

I just saw her and I thought, oh, my God!

I?d never seen a face like that.

I was scared to talk to her.

I was at a club in New York, and I finally talked to her,

this was about 20 years ago.

And we just...

She was so sweet, and polite, and she was the best model ever.

She had this body that was sort of, I'd never seen before, you know?

It was, people would say it was artificial,

but I didn't see it like that.

Because I saw it as she was realising her dream, and she was

actually one of the most content human beings I've met on the planet.

Again, and I swear to you, I'm not saying that, like she

honestly is the most content.

I've met so many celebrities who are so unhappy, and their lives are so,

you know, three cell phones, and they're so stressed out.

And even now, when I come to Hawaii, I still shoot celebrities

occasionally, and their phones are all going, they're not even looking

around for a minute to see the rainforest, the jungle, or just take

some time in these stressful lives.

Amanda, when she had her sex change, she was so at peace.

And she was the best model.

You know, people can say what they want about my work, I will keep

photographing what I'm attracted to, and that happens to fall

into a lot of different things.

I mean, you can like classical music, and you can also like

classical rock, and you can also go out and dance to disco and enjoy it.

You can like a lot of stuff in the world.

You don't have to limit it to one thing.

What I like, what's in my head at that time, I photograph.

And I just don't...

Of course I want the audience to connect,

I want people to enjoy, to get to something from it, to get pleasure.

But I'm never doing it in a manipulative way, or trying to

shock people, or trying to...

You don't set out to deliberately shock?

I don't.

I mean, when the horse is nuzzling Angelina Jolie's breasts?

It was so beautiful.

She was having this moment with the horse, it was just the two of us.

It was so natural.

It wasn't a production.

My assistants were really far away, and we were in this field, and...

But the end result is an image, when you look at it in the lab,

or on the computer, and you're working with it, you know when you

put it out there it is going to, it's going to shock people.

No, I did not, I swear to God I did not.

I promise you, I didn't know.

I mean, I still don't think it's shocking.

Really?

Why is that shocking?

To some people it...

It's a horse.

It's not licking her breast, he's right here.

In fact, you know, I don?t even know if Angelina knows

this, but I took her nipples out of the picture because I didn't want

to exploit her.

I want to ask you about one specific photograph of yours

which is causing a storm right now.

For the so-called Life Ball in Vienna,

an event which supports HIV and AIDs charities, you have produced this

picture of a transgender individual, Carmen Carrera.

You very explicitly show her breasts, but also her male genitals.

In Austria, there are people who are expressing absolute disgust, who are

calling you a criminal and wanting to press charges against you.

Why did you feel it was right to put that picture out there?

I never meant to cause any shock or any harm to Vienna.

What this picture is about is the transgendered woman,

Carmen Carrera, this beautiful woman who has the male genitalia.

The female element is dominant.

It's very explicit.

You must have known people, looking at this on the street...

But it's not an erotic photograph, and it's not pornographic.

It's a beautiful image, it's in a garden.

It's not erotic.

But it's on a giant billboard.

Yes, it's all over Vienna.

Mothers and children are going to walk past it.

They can walk by naked women, but why are we allowing them to

play video games that are violent, and why is every movie, Saw 1, 2,

3, 4, The Hunger Games, where children are killing

children, torturing children, and we don't mind that, that's OK.

We are in the Dark Ages.

When the body is shameful, yet killing and torture is entertainment

and we're applauding it?

That's the real pornography.

That's the real evil, and that's the real darkness.

Are you saying that you, as a photographer and an artist,

have no obligation to think about the offence that an image

like that might cause?

No, it was never meant to offend anybody.

That's never been my idea, to offend somebody.

It's to enlighten people.

This is a beautiful image.

It could be...

It was really inspired by Botticelli.

She's is in this garden, and it's beautiful.

And just because she's different from us,

what are you offended about?

Are you offended about the breast, or the male genitalia?

Just because she doesn?t look like us, it doesn?t mean...

Because it's not made the same way does not mean that it's

not beautiful.

Let me pick up on something you just said which I found fascinating.

You described how, working with celebrities, you're often very

struck by how stressed out they are, how they're tied to their mobile

phones, and they are unhappy people.

Some.

Not all, but most that I've met.

And I want you, then, to explain to me why you decided,

not entirely, but pretty much, to walk away from this world?

I think it was 05/06?

Yes.

You seemed to have had a bit of an epiphany.

Thank you!

What happened?

Well, it was an epiphany, and then I had to act on that epiphany.

It took a while.

There was a certain point in my career, and my assistant looked

at me, and I'd finished this film, Rise, this documentary on dancing in

central LA, that was a three-year project, while I was working

on the Elton John show in Vegas.

It couldn't be two polar opposites.

At the time, everybody from Elton John to all the big musical

acts, to all the big advertisers and fashion houses, and the celebs,

they all wanted a piece of you.

You were making a lot of money.

Yes.

And that's not to be sniffed at.

But you took the decision that this was not the life you wanted to lead?

I just would really like to know why and how that happened.

Well, you're absolutely right, it wasn't

the life I wanted to live any more.

I fell out of love with this, with celeb...

I felt like I was in the celebrity service industry.

It started getting...

The publicists and pressure, it was getting really hard-core.

My assistant turned to me during that period and said,

?It's been 11 months, and we have not had one day off.?

And I realised, going back, that's where, you know,

that's when I, for that brief moment, had started doing drugs to

have one night, escape, a vacation of the mind, just for a night.

But I never missed a job.

I'd be up in the morning.

That was hard drugs, as well?

Keeping you going?

It was a vacation of the mind.

I used them to escape, have a break.

Are you saying, if you hadn't walked away in '06, you might have

pushed yourself over the edge?

Oh, absolutely.

Oh, hell, yeah, yes.

I would have, for sure.

I want to end by just reflecting on something you've said your mum used

to tell you when you were young.

She said, look, we don't care if you end up being

the garbage guy down the street.

Just be a good person.

Yeah.

When you reflect back on everything we've discussed,

this extraordinary career with its highs and its lows, its challenges,

have you been a good person?

I've tried.

And changing my life and moving to Maui has made it easier,

having balance in my life has made it easier to be a better person.

When I was out of balance, I was taking the stress and losing

my temper and having anger, and things like that, which have

really changed a lot since I left.

You were behaving a bit like some of the celebs that you were

photographing.

No, I was never arrogant, and I was never cruel.

But I had problems handling the stress, and how I would do that,

I would scream and yell, and then I'd go and apologise to

my whole staff, they'd be like, ?We've heard it before.?

The madness didn't end with the photograph.

The madness, the craziness of the pictures, it wasn't like,

OK, we're done, then suddenly it was having tea and it was quiet.

It was kind of insane.

But we also had a lot of love.

It wasn't, like, this dark period, or anything like that.

It just, it had its less-than-pretty moments, but it really was,

for most of us, it was 20 years and only three or four of those years

involved drugs and things like that.

For the rest of it, it was...

It was a dream come true.

People worked with me for 25 years, so I couldn't have been that bad

of a guy.

They're still with me today.

They're still with you.

David LaChapelle, it's been a pleasure to have you on HARDtalk.

Thank you, thank you very much indeed.

I just try and do the best I can for them while they're with me.

What's the hardest thing about being a foster parent?

You're constantly trying to build the elusive trust.

It's like a big old question mark in your heart.

I just try and do the best I can for them while they're with me.

Join Lorraine Pascale as she looks at stories of fostering...

I wasn't happy at all, but now I am. ..including her own.