(I'm so Excited) David LaChapelle to Shoot Mariah for Christmas Album
In less than 12 hours, Mariah Carey will arrive at David LaChapelle's Los Angeles studio to be photographed for her Christmas album. LaChapelle chastises himself for telling me ("it's meant to be a secret"), then shrugs: "Well, I've told you everything else." We've been together all day at his home, by his pool, in his bedroom and now at his cacophonous, warrenous workspace, ricocheting this way and that around a life of sex, death, celebrity, drugs, depression, art, disco and — he insists — miracles.
On a series of stage sets, as his friend Michael Jackson's songs pound from the music system, LaChapelle's team are garlanding fake windows with lights and arranging presents under a hideous silver tree. LaChapelle's close friend Sharon Gault, Madonna's former make-up artist (and his "unofficial wife"), is organising food. Carey, says LaChapelle, "isn't a diva. She never pisses on the little people." There is a graffitied city backdrop of night-time blues and sulphurous yellows. Fake snow is in bags. "That's pretty," I say, looking at wooden cutout reindeer. "Mariah wanted real ones," LaChapelle says, rolling his eyes. The boyish 47-year-old photographer is in jeans, scrappy T-shirt and hoody and speaks in a spacey Californian drawl. "Flown from Nebraska. Can you imagine, real reindeer?"
Well, yes, we can imagine. LaChapelle is famed for his gaudy, extravagant, some have claimed grotesque and empty, celebrity portraits; although he says he has mostly given them up, and now takes pictures only of favourites such as Carey and Lady Gaga.
[...]
At about 1am, Mariah preparations wind down. LaChapelle is going out ("just for a minute or two") to a club. He grimaces at his photographs being described as camp or kitsch. "They're just words which mean people don't want to look. I've seen people stop and look at my work in galleries. Not just at the bodies, the genitalia, but really look." If he's the cartoonist his critics claim he is, he's a serious one and obviously happier with his work on gallery walls than in magazines. But you know that, through his lens, snowflakes whirling and tinsel shimmering, Mariah will never look more Christmassy — even if the reindeer aren't real.
On a series of stage sets, as his friend Michael Jackson's songs pound from the music system, LaChapelle's team are garlanding fake windows with lights and arranging presents under a hideous silver tree. LaChapelle's close friend Sharon Gault, Madonna's former make-up artist (and his "unofficial wife"), is organising food. Carey, says LaChapelle, "isn't a diva. She never pisses on the little people." There is a graffitied city backdrop of night-time blues and sulphurous yellows. Fake snow is in bags. "That's pretty," I say, looking at wooden cutout reindeer. "Mariah wanted real ones," LaChapelle says, rolling his eyes. The boyish 47-year-old photographer is in jeans, scrappy T-shirt and hoody and speaks in a spacey Californian drawl. "Flown from Nebraska. Can you imagine, real reindeer?"
Well, yes, we can imagine. LaChapelle is famed for his gaudy, extravagant, some have claimed grotesque and empty, celebrity portraits; although he says he has mostly given them up, and now takes pictures only of favourites such as Carey and Lady Gaga.
[...]
At about 1am, Mariah preparations wind down. LaChapelle is going out ("just for a minute or two") to a club. He grimaces at his photographs being described as camp or kitsch. "They're just words which mean people don't want to look. I've seen people stop and look at my work in galleries. Not just at the bodies, the genitalia, but really look." If he's the cartoonist his critics claim he is, he's a serious one and obviously happier with his work on gallery walls than in magazines. But you know that, through his lens, snowflakes whirling and tinsel shimmering, Mariah will never look more Christmassy — even if the reindeer aren't real.
Komentar
Posting Komentar