From early aughts icons like Britney Spears to contemporary divas like Dua Lipa and Lizzo, photographer David LaChapelle has become the premiere celebrity portraitist, with his images gracing the covers of a whopping 19 Rolling Stone issues.
LaChapelle’s decades-long career is now the focus of a new exhibition at Fotografiska, titled “Make Believe,” that spans all six floors of the museum. A big chunk of the exhibition is dedicated to his chronicling of America’s entertainers, sure, but it also takes a deeper look into the artist’s long career.
The exhibit’s foundation is Chapelle’s early images from the ’80s, which responded to the AIDS crisis, and also includes his environmentally focused series, his fashion shoots, and his latest work from earlier this year. Throughout, we see how he often subtlety nods to art history in a myriad of ways.
Below is a small sample from the 150 works on view in the new exhibit.
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Light Within, 1986
LaChapelle’s response to the AIDS crisis was to make images that melded together his Catholic upbringing and his identity as a gay man.
“My earliest works from the 1980s were motivated by a search to represent a loving God, the nature of the soul and heaven during a devastating period when I lost many friends,” said Chapelle in a statement.
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Andy Warhol: Last Sitting, 1986
In his final years, Andy Warhol became fast friends with LaChapelle. The two were united in their mutual identity as gay men with Catholic upbringings, and this photograph would have been taken months before his death in early 1987.
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Alexander McQueen & Isabella Blow: Burning the House Down, 1996
LaChapelle would become known for his fantastical, over the top fashion shoots. Pictured here is designer Steve McQueen and Isabella Blow, his patron who bought out his thesis collection for his master’s degree in fashion design at Central Saint Martins in London.
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Angelina Jolie; Lusty Spring, 2001
LaChapelle’s portraits tend to bring out the most sexual side of his female subjects, though this hasn’t been the case as much in recent years. “We’re living in such a puritanical moment right now when it comes to sex,” he said in a 2017 interview with The Guardian.
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My Own Marilyn, 2002
Inspired by Andy Warhol’s famous Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964), which sold for a record-breaking $195 million at Christie’s New York in May, LaChapelle reimagined the series with his own muse, trans icon Amanda Lepore.
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After the Deluge, 2007
LaChapelle’s concern for the environment began showing up in his work in the mid-2000s, with such works as After the Deluge (2007), which depicts a flooded museum.
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Gas: Shell, 2012
In 2011, after quitting the world of celebrity and fashion (at least for a while), LaChapelle moved to Hawaii, where he began this series, titled “Gas.” Inspired by Edward Hopper’s 1940 painting Gas, he juxtaposes nature and man’s polluting behaviors into compelling tableaux.
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Seismic Shift, 2012
Though LaChapelle continued shooting personal projects over the years, his association with celebrity, MTV, and fashion kept him feeling like an outsider to the art world. This image shows a flooded art fair with iconic works by the likes of Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons having been destroyed.
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Magenta Torch Ginger No.1, 2019
Much of LaChapelle’s recent work remains focused on the environment in a continuous celebration of the Earth’s beauty.
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Mary Magdalene: Abiding Lamentation, 2018
Even as LaChapelle maintained his fine art practice, he continued shooting the most famous celebrities in the world, like Kim Kardashian in 2018.