Meet us at the virtual museum for a conversation between internationally renowned photographer David LaChapelle and PAMM Director Franklin Sirmans.

LaChapelle got his first break when Andy Warhol discovered him by way of Studio 54 and hired LaChapelle as a contributing photographer for Interview Magazine. Through his mastery of color, unique composition, and imaginative narratives, LaChapelle has expanded the genre of photography since 1980, becoming known and copied for his high-gloss and colorfully elaborate approach. LaChapelle and Sirmans will discuss how and from where LaChapelle finds inspiration, especially during challenging times such as these.

*Catch this Live Virtual Art Talk on PAMM Facebook Live and YouTube Live. Please consider becoming a member of the PAMM Photography and Video Arts Council to participate in a private virtual meeting with the artist following the public conversation.*

ABOUT DAVID LACHAPELLE
David LaChapelle was born in Connecticut in 1963 and attended high school at North Carolina School of The Arts. Originally enrolled as a painter, he developed an analog technique by hand-painting his own negatives to achieve a sublime spectrum of color before processing his film.

At age 17, LaChapelle moved to New York City. Following his first photography show at Gallery 303, he was hired by Andy Warhol to work at Interview Magazine.

Through his mastery of color, unique composition, and imaginative narratives, LaChapelle began to expand the genre of photography. His staged tableau, portrait, and still life works challenged devices of traditional photography and his work quickly gained international interest. By 1991, The New York Times predicted, "LaChapelle is certain to influence the work of a new generation...in the same way that Mr. Avedon pioneered so much of what is familiar today."

In the decades since, LaChapelle has become one of the most published photographers throughout the world with an anthology of books including LaChapelle Land (1996), Hotel LaChapelle (1999), Heaven to Hell (2006), Lost & Found, and Good News (2017).  Simultaneously, his work has expanded into music video, film, and stage projects.  His 2005 feature film Rize was released theatrically in 17 countries. Many of his still and film works have become iconic archetypes of America in the 21st Century.

In the past 30 years, LaChapelle has exhibited internationally in galleries and museums including the National Portrait Gallery (London), Musee de Monnaie (Paris), Barbican Centre (London), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Musee D'Orsay (Paris), Groninger Museum (The Netherlands), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome), National Portrait Gallery (Washington D.C.), and Casa dei Tre Oci (Venice). Last year's highlights included a major solo exhibition at La Venaria Reale (Turin).​

♪♪ ♪♪ but still, it's a lot of fun to watch.

I should probably stop now and go back to work.

Good evening everyone and welcome to the virtual Pérez Art Museum Miami.

My name is Marie Vickles and I'm the Director of Education.

Tonight, in collaboration with the PAM Photography and Video Council, We are presenting a special program that will feature a conversation between internationally renowned photographer David LaChapelle and PAM director Franklin Sermons.

Our mission at PAM is to encourage everyone to see art as an incentive for genuine human interaction, communication, and exchange.

And we are thrilled to bring you this evening's program.

I sincerely hope that all of you are joining us in this digital space, that you are doing well, taking care of yourselves, your loved ones, and that tonight's program brings some joy into your life.

A few acknowledgments before we get started.

I would like to thank the incredible team of people that work so very hard to make our education programs come together, both at the museum and now online.

I would like to acknowledge Anita Bram, Associate Director of Adult Programs and Audience Engagement, Melinda Marcuse, Manager of Individual Giving and Affiliate Groups, Alan Buehler, Membership Manager, and our world-class AV team, Denise Faxes and Andrew Byrd.

Now, let's get this program started with introductions of our featured speakers.

David LaChapelle was born in Connecticut and attended high school at North Carolina School of the Arts.

Originally enrolled as a painter, he developed an analog technique by hand painting his own negatives to achieve a sublime spectrum of color before processing his film.

At age 17, LaChapelle moved to New York City, and following his first photography show at Gallery 303, he was hired by Andy Warhol to work at Interview Magazine.

Through his mastery of color, unique composition, and imaginative narratives, La Chapelle began to expand the genre of photography.

His staged tableau, portrait, and still life works challenged devices of traditional photography, and his work quickly gained international interest.

By 1991, the New York Times predicted, La Chapelle is certain to influence the work of a new generation, in the same way that Mr.

Avedon pioneered so much of what is familiar today.

In the decades since, La Chapelle has become 1 of the most published photographers throughout the world, with an anthology of books including La Chapelle Land 1996, Hotel La Chapelle

Heaven to Hell 2006, Lost and Found and Good News

Simultaneously his work has expanded into music, video, film, and stage projects.

His 2005 feature film Rise was released theatrically in 17 countries.

Many of his still and film works have become iconic archetypes of America in the 21st century.

Over the past 30 years, La Chapelle has exhibited internationally in galleries and museums, including the National Portrait Gallery London, Musée des Monnaies Paris, Barbican Centre London, Victoria and Albert Museum London, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, Groninger Museum, the Netherlands, Palazzo dell'Esposizione, Rome, the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., and Casa dei Treoci, Venice.

Last year's highlights included a major solo exhibition at La Venaria Reale, Turin.

Franklin Sermons, director of the Perez Art Museum Miami since

is an internationally recognized art critic, editor, writer, and curator.

Sermons has established himself as 1 of the leading voices in contemporary art, joining Pam from his previous post at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA, where he held the position as department head and curator of contemporary art.

Prior to LACMA, Sermon served as a curator of modern and contemporary art at the Menil Collection in Houston.

Highlights from his curatorial career include variations, conversations in and around abstract painting, football, the beautiful game, Ends and Exits, Contemporary Art from the Collections of LACMA and the Broad Art Foundation.

And Mauricio Catalan, Is There Life Before Death?

He is a sought-after scholar on the work of Basquiat and co-curated the exhibition entitled Basquiat, which traveled from the Brooklyn Museum to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and on to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

In 2014, as the Artistic Director of Prospect New Orleans, Viennal, he presented the landmark program P3, Notes for Now.

Entering his fifth year leading Miami's flagship art museum, Sermons continues to write and edit for numerous artist and exhibition catalogs, making a compelling impact on the world of contemporary art.

During the course of this evening's conversation, please post your questions on our Facebook and YouTube platforms for the live Q&A portion of the program.

We will try to answer as many as possible.

Our program will now begin with a video montage of LaChapelle's work, followed by the conversation with David LaChapelle and Franklin's sermons.

And I thought that that would be the most apt way to begin a conversation with you, 1 in which I could go on forever, but we only have a little bit of time, would be to start with a montage of images and to at least give people a glimpse at some of the incredible images that you have taken over this last 3 decades.

It's an amazing career And I have to just begin from the beginning, from the here and now, where are you and what is your day like in this time of social distancing and protest?

You know, Last summer I was in, where I live in Hawaii, off the grid on this ranch that's very isolated.

And I really felt a change, a big change, like we're entering a new chapter in the world where the insect population over the last 3 years of being there had really plummeted.

And I've been going there for 25 years and I've had my ranch for about 15 now.

And in the last 3 years, the insects just really disappeared and the water temperatures, you know, you feel the difference.

And with the insects, also the birds have gone down and I had like loads of frogs that I'd make ponds for and their populations crashed.

The gecko, which is 1 of the mascots of that area of Hawaii, their populations crashed.

And so I saw that firsthand, and I really felt that, you know, with this crazy drought that we had last year, I just felt that we're in this new chapter.

I felt this new, that things were not the same.

And so when COVID happened, it wasn't like a big shock to me as I already got very depressed.

I went through kind of a mourning period with that knowledge.

And I read everything I could about it and found these research papers.

And sure enough, it said the insect populations in the tropics will be the first hit in the Arctic.

And then 2 years later, the New York Times came out with it above the fault, this cover story on the insect apocalypse.

And it was quoting some of the same studies that I'd found online.

So I really felt that we're in this different chapter.

You know, it's 1 thing seeing things about climate on a documentary, but it's another experiencing in pristine rainforests where suddenly everything is changing that's been there in place for millions of years.

So when COVID, I thought this was a time to, for myself to, to introspect, to be quiet, to use that time to look at life and take a look at my life and introspective time and the quiet time.

I was feeling like, okay, this is the quiet before the storm, but I told it to a friend of mine, and It just felt like that to me.

And then we had this, you know, a lot of unrest since then.

But I had a lot of, you know, feelings about this.

I felt like my role in all this, like it was in the beginning, when I first was taking photos, my friends were dying of AIDS.

And very early on, I was 18, and I felt this was this biblical plague that was coming, and there was just this unnamed disease with only 46 cases.

And I just had this premonition that I was gonna do this massive global thing that was gonna affect my life personally.

And so through that again now, that sense of urgency to put pictures into the world that are beautiful, that touch people, that maybe are escapists, or just bring the moments of moving them in some way, connecting with them, and not adding to the confusion and the darkness and the trauma.

There certainly is a big place for journalism, but my work is different and I wanna bring as much beauty as I can.

Yeah, I wanna go talk about some of that history, but I can't leave this moment that you describe and the fact that, you know, having been there before, there's the beginning of your film, Rise, which was mentioned.

And it actually begins with archival footage of Watts in 1965 and archival footage of LA in 1992 in the wake of Rodney King and so to be in this moment again in so many ways I just wanted to throw that out there before we leave this point.

And you continue to work and make beautiful images in that moment.

And, you know, without ignoring where we are, there's very much a reaction to that as well.

Using the figure in nature, it's sort of this radical reaction to the quantification I found in art.

A lot of contemporary art that I felt wasn't really speaking to, not really taking this moment.

We're in this incredible time in human history.

And I didn't feel that a lot of artists were the work was talking to me about this moment that we're in or helping me understand it in any way, or was even about it.

It was sort of just, here's my artwork and then whatever's happening in the world is happening in the world, but I didn't find a connection.

And I'm always, I feel, reacting to what's going on and what's going on in my head.

And what I want to say is always what I'm thinking about.

And it's never about market, or what people can purchase, or any of those types of things.

It's always, you know, when my friends were dying of AIDS, it was things very, got very much into the idea of spirit and soul and what happens when we die and metaphysical questions.

And today again, you know, I feel that faith is so important in our lives and putting those images out there and the idea of the figure in nature, this Renaissance idea.

Because I feel we are in this dark ages, this time.

In 79, I was 15 when I first moved there.

I dropped out of public school when I was 15, because I was getting bullied and then lived in the East Village for 2 years.

Then I somehow, by a miracle, got accepted to North Carolina School of the Arts, which had a high school program.

Having missed 2 years, I couldn't really graduate.

And that's back when schools were subsidized.

But there was very, very little, there was no debt or anything like that and my heart breaks for these young young kids today with these incredible amounts of debt they have to, especially in the art colleges and things, and they're not learning art history, things like that, and it makes me very sad.

Was it shortly after you arrived or what were

It was right after I got out of high school.

I had a friend, Lisa Spoman, and she had a loft.

And I Said 1 night after we were dancing at a club isn't you know, let's I was reusing her darkroom printing these black-and-white images And I said, let's turn your gallery into Your loft into a gallery.

So it did and we was 303 Park Avenue South.

So we call it 303 and We had the first show goodness from outer man and the second show of angels saints martyrs and in that time and they were all came the Staff from interview and they asked me if I would work for our interview.

And I was just so excited to take pictures.

Were the pictures that you showed at 303, were they similar to what you would work on at Interview?

Well, at that time I was doing black and white and a lot of manipulation in the darkroom.

I was doing a lot of those pictures that I spoke of, the metaphysical, you know, answering those visually, the metaphysical questions of life after death, and what does a soul look like, and were the ancients correct, and a winged figure representing, you know, the spirit.

You know, watching, having my friends die so young, those questions were in the forefront of my mind and I wanted to answer that, but also answer it with beauty.

Because I thought I was gonna die as well, so I didn't really have long-term plans.

I wanted to get as much done as I could, not for legacy, but just to leave something for the world of beauty.

I think we have some of those early images.

So I had to make these wings so they could you know not have straps.

All the wings available, but I tell them little tiny ones that could never lift someone off the ground.

I took every dollar I had out of the bank and I found this guy that could make them for me.

And I designed it so that the wire went down.

So even back then, it was sort of working with the magical or the unphotographable.

It wasn't just digital that enabled me to do that.

I was already doing that, painting the halo on with a blue dye to give it that yellow, on the negative so everything comes reversed.

So yeah, that that was where my head is at.

I wanted to see these images of beauty and angels and ideas of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

This is Kane forgiving Abel This is Kane forgiving Abel for killing him.

So even with just having been in a high school program at that point, And your interest in art history is something that goes, I think, throughout your whole career, obviously.

The usage of the Baroque, the usage of Renaissance and imagery, and putting subjects often in certain direct poses and compositions.

I loved Michelangelo from way before I thought I would be a photographer or anything like that.

And Michelangelo, the figures, but the gestures and the drama and the facial expressions, the hands, you know, he says so much with the hands and so much with the faces that his work to me is a little bit different than the other Renaissance masters.

Botticelli is a little more open, and the people are very placid, beautiful, tranquil faces, where Michelangelo has this drama, and there are these faces that are giving you these, you know, action.

And so I was very drawn to Michelangelo, that sort of heroic figures, and then the beauty of it was so sublime.

I mean, it really, really spoke to me at a very young age.

I don't—my very first roll of film in high school was when I, you know, it starts off, we had photo class, and then we left photo class, and I'm kind of photographing, we had 36 frames, I'm photographing the light hitting the stairs and, you know, the kind of typical high school subject.

By frame 18, all my friends, we're all 15, 16, they're all dancers at the school, and they're all naked in my dorm room.

Nothing erotic was going on, but I was having all these dying slaves and all these Renaissance poses in my dorm room.

You know, I love that collaborative aspect, but there it is in the very first contact sheet, you know, already that really just loved her songs and still find it as a big source of inspiration.

was at the New York Times, and it was their first photograph in a magazine.

It was my woman's assignment for them, And they weren't signed to a label yet or anything.

We met in Times Square by Nathan's and we did these crazy photographs.

I was just me alone with my little Minolta.

It's funny, I think oftentimes, you know, the balance between the art object on the wall and the gallery versus what you're doing in the magazine has often been a point of conversation and disagreement.

I mean, you are 1 of the few people who have had incredible success on both sides of that conversation.

Were you looking at Mapplethorpe in that moment and thinking about your own avenue?

At the time in 84, when I had that show at

You either worked as a fine art, I assume you worked as a commercial photographer.

And Andy went from illustration, he even had a little bit of a hard time because he thought of him as an illustrator until he really busted out and he had the help of some great curators.

But you did commercial or you did fine art, and there was a very strong line between that.

And when I started working for Interview, that opened up this world of magazines and that just kept growing until finally it was this massive, you know, I was like, you know, wow, I was just shooting everything and I was so excited.

But I really felt that I had left, I kind of burnt that bridge.

I couldn't go back to working for galleries because you didn't do that in the 80s.

I was friends with Eddie Mapplethorpe, Robert's younger brother, and he was telling me that his art dealer was mad at him because he had done a little too much commercial work that year, so we told him to stop.

Well, in my 20 years of work for magazines and this crazy planes everywhere, shooting everybody, fashion and celebrities, I didn't realize the world had completely changed.

So when I moved to Maui to kind of really end photography, because I felt like I'd said all I could say at that time, celebrity and fashion, I was done.

What I did was that the whole world had changed And I got a call from gallery, would you show?

You know, and then I got another 12 years, this whole, I could never plan that, but what a gift to be able to, to phony, you know, to do, to exhibit.

When I first stopped, I really was like, no, no commercial work at all.

But now I don't look at it as commercial.

I look at it like, you know, photographing Travis Scott or photographing this artist, people that make up our world, to me, you know, they can also, they're not 1 thing, I don't categorize them in my brain anymore.

You know, I'm like, it all has a potential to be in a museum or gallery, possibly if you do it right, you know?

Yeah, I have to say, I mean, for me personally, that was the takeaway.

I had the great pleasure of basically sitting and walking into your work the entire summer of 1999, because I was working on the next exhibition, which was a Basquiat show at Tony Schifrazi.

And within that context of painting, of photography, of sculpture, whatever, it was art.

It was not, you know, Tony didn't delineate between this belongs here and this belongs there.

It was amazing to be able to see it in that context.

I mean, if you remember, Keith Haring opened the pop shop and he the critics raged him over the cold for selling You know, you want to make art accessible so you buy a 75 cent button or a t-shirt So kids could be part of their own too and they they like always selling out and commercial.

I mean, think about that today, opening a pop shop was actually a very altruistic, beautiful thing he had done when he had gotten highly criticized.

Now they're so integrated and it's so much better I think

yeah should we show a few more images let's run through a few more images

Amanda with Cora mm-hmm pretty classic little Kim yeah

She was coming to studio almost every week at that point.

And I was just coming up with different ideas.

And logos were not popular at that moment.

It had been popular in the 70s and kind of gone away.

But I had Dapper Dan, a brahmin that inspired me, seeing his stuff when I was a kid at the break dancing shows and you know, in the clubs.

And I just thought, what if we covered her body in a stencil like a luxury item.

And funny enough, like, you know, a year, I got a cease and desist from going to town.

And then a year later, suddenly on down the runways, everybody was showing logos again.

I mean, this reminds me, you're not, you know, when people say you're photographing celebrities, It's not really, these are the most enigmatic and and incredible kind of lives of our times.

what I love about this photo, Whitney, that's 6 in the morning, but it's a real, you can tell a real laugh from someone who's fake laughing and she was just having such a good time.

And it's so beautiful because you really see her, that anxious, full of joy.

That was, you know, from the pop art influence, you know, the early collages of Westleman.

A lot of the work, I mean, it's not just that classical kind of art history that I mentioned, but I mean, the real kind of interest in composition and form based upon many moments of art history.

and it's about like the Arctic, you know, refreezing and through this boat, we could have never predicted what happened with the cruise ships and everything, but became sort of emblematic for the time.

And always using, I always used people that were in my life, you know, all shapes and sizes.

This caused kind of a ruckus because it was for a fashion magazine and people, you know, using a large girl at that time wasn't done.

So I've always, you know, just used my friends and people around me.

The Island of Misfit Toys, we call ourselves.

So I always put my friends in photographs and my friends come in every shape and size and color.

So they'd find their way into photographs.

So it was a very inclusive set of images, career, I guess.

This is 20 years ago, this is a fashion story, but you know, just there's so many bottles of time, so the first time I'd seen that many plastic bottles, I mean, now we see, I think, even more, but just wanted to say something about that.

But for fashion, pictures weren't expected to have social contacts at that time.

So a lot of magazines would like, please tell me to calm down and just focus on the clothes.

And then this is 1 of the last stories I did for a fashion magazine.

And if you want to shock fashion people or art people that matter, just talk about Jesus or God in not an ironic sense, but in a true sense of...

I just heard, it's for an English magazine, and I just heard, the editor goes, and what do you wanna do next?

And I said, I wanna do this, I saw this T-shirt called Jesus is my homeboy, and I wanna do a whole series, what, you know, Jesus came back, what his disciples would look like, and the oppressed people of the world, and, you know, that's who they hung out with, the misfits.

And I just heard this silence, you know, in the line.

So I made sure to include every credit, you know, the advertisers for the magazine that, you know, so.

Just to make sure that would help get in the magazine.

And this is the first picture I did after, after, you know, the whole stopping working for magazines and getting reintroduced to being able to, the idea of photographing pictures for galleries and museums and this was the Deluge series with the great flood, this is 13 years ago.

And so this is a panel from the Sistine Chapel that I reimagined in Vegas, like, so just in city, and just arranging all the bodies, and then sort of loosely basing it on the composition from Michelangelo.

I mean, you said that you felt like you had done everything in terms of what you wanted to say.

And how long was it that you stayed in Hawaii and kind of took a moment?

Well, it was only 6 months that I was there until I got that cough in the gut.

It was funny because I was like, okay, I'm a farmer now.

I had so much work to do on the property.

And, and then I knew I had more photos in me, but I just didn't think, you know, I could really keep doing celebrity like that, just only in fashion.

And then I got a call so I was so excited and I really wanted to do this and this idea of the great disruption coming so how to depict that well on the modern flood of you know the biblical flood of Noah and then this sort of flood of the future or the event of the future, that will be the disruption.

A lot of people when they're faced with death and they're faced with their material things being washed away, it's sort of a last chance, that portal to enlightenment.

So people going to church was sort of the idea of the flooded cathedral.

And then the Flooded Museum, where what was once priceless is now valueless unless we can use it as a raft.

And I think that's the intangible thing about art.

When we stand in a museum and we look at a painting, it's ours, we own it.

In the sense of the world that nothing is really on, we're renting everything.

See all Pérez Art Museum Miami transcripts on Youtube

Live Virtual Art Talk: David LaChapelle and Franklin Sirmans