DAVID LACHAPELLE: My real love is doing the still image, but
in the sense of creating these scenes or creating these
tableaux in stories and narrative, where you're
reaching people through an image.
That's my love.
I love the power that's within that still image.
This is where we do all of our woodworking and set-building.
And above us is prop storage, and then this is one of our
psychs in here.
This is my work room, editing room.
I like to be back here.
It's quiet and I have the lights, the
color balance lights.
Because photography, everything's about the color
and the saturation.
This is where we watch movies and stuff.
So everybody take a seat, and we'll watch a movie.
I grew up in Connecticut.
At 15 years old, I dropped out of school
and came to New York.
I was already going to New York around 14 years old,
taking the train.
It was a 45-minute train ride, or an hour train
ride to Grand Central.
Started going to nightclubs.
I started going to discos and nightclubs in Connecticut, and
then we started going to New York.
It really was a big, big time for dancing.
And so it was just a great time to come of age.
And I had all these really cool friends in New York.
And they weren't that much older than me.
I mean, they were 18, 19, and 20, but I felt pretty mature
at that time.
Even though I wasn't.
And then moved in with this girl, Vanessa, on First Avenue
and First Street.
She worked at CBGB's, which was a nightclub, and I got a
job at Studio 54.
So she'd always tease me because I was going to what
she thought was like a fruity, [INAUDIBLE]
uptown club.
She's was like downtown.
But I'd go to both.
I'd go to Mud Club and CBGB's.
And then there'd be Studio 54.
Because I liked the glamour and I also liked hanging out
downtown where I lived, in the East Village.
And I was 17, and my dad came.
I always kept in touch with my parents.
They were great.
And my dad's like--
he finally just was like, you gotta just try
to finish high school.
You can't just be sitting here another year.
And we'd heard about this art school in North Carolina
called North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem.
And they accepted me.
They let me in as a senior.
I never graduated 'cause I didn't have enough credits.
But halfway through our senior year, we had a photography
intensive, like for the second half of the year.
And I knew right then, at that school, that
photography was it.
And I never really finished a drawing or a painting, like
really finished a drawing or painting.
I still sketch, and sketch ideas and stuff.
But that really was it for me.
It was just a great place to meet other young artists,
whether they were dancers, or visual artists, or musicians.
Just like-minded kids.
It was really incredible.
And from that school, I came back to New York.
I was 18 and just picked up where I left off.
My friend had a loft on 23rd, 303 Park Avenue South.
And she was working in the fashion business at the time,
and she was a couple of years older than me.
And we were best friends.
And I said, Lisa, would you do a show in your loft?
I was using her darkroom.
She had a dark room in there.
So we did a show in her loft space, of my photographs.
And that was in '84.
I called it--
the first show was "Good News for Modern Man."
The first photos I did were black-and-white.
I printed it all myself and I was doing a lot of
experimenting with bleaching on prints.
There was a lot of interest in the metaphysical,
playing with magic.
Or the unphotographable.
The idea of the soul, or life after death, were pretty heavy
on my mind.
And nude figurative, natural light, black-and-white,
heavily Renaissance-inspired.
I started working for "Interview" with the second
show at Lisa's gallery in '84.
We did a show three months later called "Angels, Saints,
and Martyrs." And that show--
I kept bringing my pictures back to the offices at
"Interview." Because Andy said, show us your pictures.
So from '84 to '87, I was showing in galleries and
working at "Interview."
Just getting published was really exciting.
The first picture of the Beastie Boys ever
published was mine.
And just getting these great assignments, and meeting all
these cool people.
And just getting your picture printed in a-- it was an
oversized magazine.
And wound up taking the last portrait of Andy, like formal
portrait of him, before he died.
Just a couple of weeks before he died.
We didn't know, of course, that he was going to die.
Nobody thought that.
He was so young.
I was just in love with photography, and wanting to
give something to the world rather than--
I know.
I never thought I was going to make money, or notoriety, or
anything like that, never really crossed my mind.
Honestly, it was more about, what can I give, rather than
what am I going to get out of it?
Or something.
Especially when my friends started dying of AIDS and
things like that, I wanted to do
pictures that were uplifting.
I never wanted to create more confusion or
darkness or ugly things.
And that's a relative term, because what's ugly to me may
not be ugly to you, or what's beautiful to me may not be
beautiful to you.
But I had to just be really truthful with myself, or
honest, and take pictures that I thought were beautiful.
Later, it started seeing more celebrities and stuff like
that, but it was an unplanned journey.
People always say, well, why don't you show your sets, you
know, at galleries.
My head would explode if I started doing installations.
I keep it to photography just to give myself parameters.
Smirnoff was doing this Midnight Circus.
I was just glad to be involved, because I love
nightlife and dancing.
I think it's a great release.
But a project like this, in my mind, is just another
opportunity to create something that will wind up in
photographs anyway, wind up as a sort of your memorable
snapshot of the mind, if not a real photograph.
Probably both.
So I just think of it as a set piece for a photograph.
I like short-form film.
I like commercials and videos and stuff.
Music videos that really-- the last one we did was Florence
and the Machine, "Spectrum," a few weeks ago.
And that was a lot of fun.
She's super nice.
[MUSIC - FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE, "SPECTRUM"]
This is another shooting era.
This is one of the Florence sets was.
We had it rigged so light could come through the floor,
and lights were back here, and chandelier, and so on.
I like to recycle sets and use them over and
over, repaint them.
I don't like to--
we try to be as economical as possible, with saving
resources and also, it's just--
so having a nice studio like this in LA, we can keep a lot
of flats and reuse them over and over.
Repaint them instead of having to build them
and chuck them out.
So we use all these elements and we configure them into
different--
depending what shoots we're doing.
This is where we shot the dance sequence of Florence.
But we used this--
I mean, I use it for everything.
So these psychs, there's three of them in the
studio that we can use.
Because it doesn't have any square walls, it kind of goes
into this big void and looks much bigger than it is.
[MUSIC - FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE, "SPECTRUM"]
To me, that's the magic of art, when you connect.
Like when you hear a song--
oh, but what I'm feeling, I've felt, I've been there.
Or just the notes and tune of the music, the melody that
haunts you, that stays with you--
I strive for my photographs to have that same impact and the
same feelings.
When you walk into the gallery or a museum exhibition, or
something, you'd see that.
And that's what I strive for.
That's sort of the goal.