Higher Power

The first time I interviewed David LaChapelle was 10 years ago this month. Back then, he was in the midst of a climate-change-tackling phase, and was unveiling a people-free series of neon-tastic surreal industrial landscape-inspired photos for Paul Kasmin’s Chelsea, New York gallery. In those days, I had less of a perceptive take on his portraiture oeuvre, and did not register the trauma that the AIDS crisis left on his creative trajectory.

We’ve both moved forward. For his part, LaChapelle, 60, went back to portraiture, and began embracing religious iconography in a way he’d only touched on in his pre-millennium work. His 2022 show at Fotografiska New York, marked his first institutional one in the United States, and featured Kanye West as the spitting image of the pop-spiritual The Passion of the Christ-style Jesus. Also key to his practice is LaChapelle’s history within and as part of the LBGTQ+ community in New York City. The artist was famously recruited in his late teens by Andy Warhol to shoot for Interview magazine. Later in his life, LaChapelle recalled developing an intense fear of HIV/AIDS during those decades as friend after friend succumbed to the virus.

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Debuting this week at VISU Contemporary in Miami, the artist’s latest show “David LaChapelle: Happy Together” brings together more than 30 of his works from the last four decades. The earliest on view dates back to 1985, when the photographer was around 22. It depicts the archangel Uriel, who is often characterized in theology as a messenger of truth. Christianity has pervaded LaChapelle’s more recent work, drawing heavily on characters and compositions from Baroque art. While framed in religious terms, LaChapelle’s imagery frequently drip in sexual innuendo, like Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, which depicts the orgiastic saint getting repeatedly stabbed with an arrow. In Miami, Revelations, Burbank, 2019, is also on view, showing an elderly couple in a passionate embrace on a desolate Los Angeles boulevard.

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Beyond the religious symbology, the photographer leaves breadcrumbs of art historical references throughout his work. In Lobster With A Side of Fries, Bahamas, 1999—a tableau of three crustacean-red, bathing-suit clad oceanside sunbathers—one woman sports a torso-spanning illustration of a lobster on her black one-piece. The orientation is almost identical to the Lobster dress that Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí collaborated on in 1937.

One work that makes its debut in ”Happy Together” synthesizes all three of these themes—queerness, religion, art history. Three Graces (male), Los Angeles, 2023, captures three male models in a circle, holding hands. It’s a direct evocation of the Three Graces motif, traditionally a depiction of Zeus’ three daughters that dates back to antiquity. The men’s muscular, partially clothed frames frozen in feminine elegance brings a gender-fluid sensuality to the trope that inexorably tethers the image to the contemporary moment. That such an aesthetic doesn’t feel so subversive as it may have a few decades ago is emblematic of a culture that has at long last caught up to LaChapelle’s ambitious and empathetic artistic vision.

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“David LaChapelle: Happy Together” is on view through March 2, 2024 at Visu Contemporary, 2160 Park Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33139.

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