Highlights from David LaChapelle's Earth Laughs In Flowers Lecture at Robilant + Voena, London. 14th February 2012

I'd like to introduce David to you, who has very sweetly come from Los Angeles to give this lecture and to be with us in Milan and St.

Moritz, where this exhibition is going to be in the following days.

Okay, well, these first images, these are pictures I did in the early 80s, living in the East Village in New York,

everything was very hard-edged and punk rock at the time, so to come out with these

sort of images that were sort of softer and different,

and it stood out, and it caught the eye of Interview Magazine which was the, where I wanted to be.

I mean, I loved Andy Warhol's work since I was

a kid and I wanted to be at Interview, it was a zeitgeist magazine.

And they started giving me their first jobs, and

it opened the door to this other world, which was magazines.

I spent 12 years, 6 black and white, and 6 in color.

So these are actual, this is scotch tape, and I'd make these little collages out of the negatives and little mini things, and I'd paint on the negative, and then I'd scotch tape them to a glass negative carrier.

And I was just doing all this experimenting when I came back to New York after that stint in London, and spent all this time and learned how to print color.

And I just learned how to manipulate color to brighten and heighten color.

And part of that, I think, also was escapist.

And these were rose petals just placed like the rayographs onto the photographic paper.

And then on the negative, I painted, and this is scotch tape again, and just would dye these negatives, manipulate them, and we'll go to the next.

And that's Emmanuel, who's a friend of mine.

you can already know that I was really interested in this idea of the magic.

So painting the halo on with a tiny little brush, and

the blues, heightening the blues by painting yellow on top

By chance, I did the last portrait of Andy before he died, last sitting, is what Vanity Fair called it, because it was, although there was a couple paparazzi shots, He went to a fashion show

I wanted him to do that thing, and he wouldn't put his finger where I wanted him to.

kind of like, I put his finger, and then you

The time working an interview was sort of like university for me.

It taught me about deadlines, it taught me openness to the world of magazines, and from that job I started working.

I just wanted to work, I just wanted to live, I wanted to survive as a photographer.

And so, nobody was buying my pictures in galleries, and they certainly weren't.

I mean, pictures were only 3 or $400, and it was very difficult to sell them.

But here was this opportunity to work for the most glamorous human being that I could think of.

the magazine years, I started photographing a lot of the people that made up the popular world of culture in the United States.

Tupac Shakur and the next picture, Lil' Kim, as a luxury item.

I don't know if people got them or not at the time.

I think now in retrospect with the new work, there's a little bit more light shined on what I was trying to do, but it was really questioning what was going on in America, the choices it was making, but the paradox was I

And so assignments kept coming in, this was my house,

this was for French Vogue, and I was making a

Suddenly art was in fashion, and it was the art issue, and

There's misconceptions about the manipulation that occurs or the digital compositing, and the only reason I defend that or wanted to film it to show the process.

Because to me process is a little, it's too much emphasis on it these days.

But instead of it being made by a machine, you know, the credit goes to my collaborators and my staff and the scenics and the painters

and these people that make these things and

I used retouching as a tool, digital retouching, as a tool to retouch, but in no way photo illustrations.

You just can't create something out of thin air anyway.

It has to be photographed, and I don't enjoy

I like the idea of the planning, the conception, and the shoots

I'd go to the neighborhoods where all the houses look alike and everyone drives the same SUV.

This is 1 of the last, last photographs I did for a fashion magazine.

This was called Jesus is My Homeboy for ID.

have any, you're working for free, plus you're paying all your expenses.

It was getting more and more difficult to get my pictures published.

was this sort of idea, I saw Jesus as my homeboy on a t-shirt and all the fundamentalist Christians were talking about, well, what if Jesus came back?

And I thought, well, if he is coming back, who would he hang out with?

Because he's certainly not gonna hang out with them.

He's gonna hang out with the people he hung out with sort of like the first time, which were the outcasts, which were the disenfranchised, and the oppressed, and those were his apostles,

So I did this story and the only challenge was getting it published and getting the fashions in

the magazine, but I made sure to get lots of advertisers' clothes in so this would be published.

I'm using magazines sort of as the gallery.

a series later on, I'm skipping through decades of pictures here, but these are towards the end and

I was dealing, I went through, I ordered on eBay family photographs and what I found was this theme of all these people drinking in every shot.

So I called this Drunk Americans and I did it for Lema Vogue and I had to digitally add in people to these scenes and make it look like it was part of it.

That says, Bush kills, drop Bush, not bombs, on this old lady's sweatshirt.

I just love that when she's drinking cocktails, she has a rifle.

I felt the Americans were drunk with power at

the time for getting everybody involved in this illicit war that's been dragging on.

a fashion artist, you don't have very much of a voice, and nobody expects political messages to be, you're not looking for that when you look for fashion or celebrity magazine.

But I did have something I wanted to say.

So these images caused a little bit of a stir when they came out.

So this was 1 family's portraits, and everyone was just drinking of a storm, and I just felt, this idea of drunk with power, and this whole thing.

But in every shot, there's little bits of militarism put into, as I

got older, I was thinking about different things, thinking about these,

the world in a different way than I did when I was

I was, you have different chapters in your life and you have to be true to that.

You can't just repeat yourself and keep doing the same thing.

You sometimes just get this inspiration and it's a beautiful thing when you get it.

This next series was What Will You Wear in Heaven?

So I was getting stronger and stronger images, or messages, loud and clear that my pictures weren't really fitting into the magazine format anymore.

the last series I ever did for a magazine, the last editorial.

It's called house at the end of the world.

to live under a rock not to feel and not to understand that things are changing, that we are at a time in the world's history that is precarious and the future is uncertain.

Does that mean be fearful or be negative or be empathetic?

No, it means do what you can and enjoy it.

We're the children that inherited this world from the Industrial Revolution when it all started happening, when the population spiked with the discovery of fossil fuels.

So it's not our fault that we're part of this system.

We could live in a cave or live in a rock and not make a carbon footprint, but we wouldn't really be living.

But this whole system that everything is built on comes from oil.

And yet I'm working for fashion magazines and I want to talk about this thing that I can't get out of my head, this idea that the climate's changing.

It's 1 way to exercise these fears is to photograph them.

This is a series downstairs, Earth, Last and Flowers.

We can go through these kind of quickly since you've probably seen the gallery show.

The Venetas or the historical still lifes.

I love that they told stories, that the objects in the picture meant something.

Even certain flowers, Certainly a cobweb would mean something.

Everything in those Dutch still lives or the other historical still lives had a purpose or told a story, either about the person who commissioned it or about something else, and everything has a symbolic value.

And today, with our disposable society, no 1 has the time to find out what those things mean, because we're so busy, and we have so much to go.

And we get our information from television.

like the Venetas, or the still life, is sort of, And there's a lot of reasons I did these images.

1 was the chapters, the transience of life, and the finding beauty and joy in all those changes of life, because life is constant change.

And like the Buddha says, the glass is already broken.

Either the wind knocked it over or your elbows are appreciated while it's still whole because it's already broken.

And those kind of things resonate with me.

And I believe all religions are rivers that lead to the same ocean.

And they're not, they shouldn't be used as means to separate ourselves.

It should be, they're more, they should be what they were intended for, to unify people.

And the true essence is there's always a seed that is very much like different prophets and enlightened people speaking to different people of different ages.

Using traditional symbolic things that you'd find on those tables in the forefront of a

The disposability, somehow the symbolism doesn't become as important anymore.

a little less care because the things are more disposable.

and our parents' time, Things were saved and things were lasted but you know greed runs the world and and and these are the same things the ancients We're dealing with

the same thing the myth the the great mythologies of Greece are talking about We have evolved but with technologies and the speed of light that we travel and live at, but have we morally changed?

No, because those same myths and stories and teachings of the prophets and the teachers are still true.

Things that were written thousands of years ago still resonate today.

You know, I'm an artist and sort of a calling as a young kid and this is just, you know, in a small way, my voice of just trying to

I'm saying that a lot of contemporary doesn't speak to things that are happening.

I go into a gallery, I'm like, What does this have to do with, I don't, you know, contemporary reflects the values of a society at any given time.

Well, if it's reflecting our values, then we're really fucked, because it's all about the price of it, the status of owning it.

I mean, every new Russian billionaire has a list of what, you know, Coons, Prince, Hearst, it's just a shopping list.

And it's a way of separating oneself from, you know, the other rich, like my yacht is bigger than your yacht, and I have this and I have that.

And art is not just for that, it has another purpose as well.

But what it is, I hope that the pendulum swings the opposite way now and that art will start to reflect a little bit more of, you know, give people some nourishment of what things will, you know, nourish us instead of just confuse us and add

And The great thing about art is that we're all entitled to our own opinions about things, you know?

And that's our own interpretations and opinions.


Speaker 0: I'd like to introduce David to you, who has very sweetly come from Los Angeles to give this lecture and to be with us in Milan and St. Moritz, where this exhibition is going to be in the following days. So, without further ado, here's David. Thank you very much for your patience.

Speaker 1: Thank you. Great. Thanks. Thank you. Okay, well, these first images, these are pictures I did in the early 80s, living in the East Village in New York,

Speaker 0: 82, 83, 84,

Speaker 1: everything was very hard-edged and punk rock at the time, so to come out with these

Speaker 2: sort of images that were sort of softer and different,

Speaker 1: and it stood out, and it caught the eye of Interview Magazine which was the, where I wanted to be. I mean, I loved Andy Warhol's work since I was

Speaker 2: a kid and I wanted to be at Interview, it was a zeitgeist magazine. And they started giving me their first jobs, and

Speaker 1: it opened the door to this other world, which was magazines. And then I started printing in color. I spent 12 years, 6 black and white, and 6 in color. So these are actual, this is scotch tape, and I'd make these little collages out of the negatives and little mini things, and I'd paint on the negative, and then I'd scotch tape them to a glass negative carrier. And I was just doing all this experimenting when I came back to New York after that stint in London, and spent all this time and learned how to print color.

And I just learned how to manipulate color to brighten and heighten color. And part of that, I think, also was escapist. Let's go to the next 1.

Speaker 2: Again, angel, these ideas of

Speaker 1: the soul. And these were rose petals just placed like the rayographs onto the photographic paper. And then on the negative, I painted, and this is scotch tape again, and just would dye these negatives, manipulate them, and we'll go to the next.

Speaker 2: And that's Emmanuel, who's a friend of mine. You know, This is a good pre-digital, so

Speaker 1: you can already know that I was really interested in this idea of the magic. So painting the halo on with a tiny little brush, and

Speaker 2: the blues, heightening the blues by painting yellow on top

Speaker 1: of the negative. By chance, I did the last portrait of Andy before he died, last sitting, is what Vanity Fair called it, because it was, although there was a couple paparazzi shots, He went to a fashion show

Speaker 2: in between this and his death. And I asked him,

Speaker 1: I wanted him to do that thing, and he wouldn't put his finger where I wanted him to. He was

Speaker 2: kind of like, I put his finger, and then you

Speaker 1: go like that. The time working an interview was sort of like university for me. It taught me about deadlines, it taught me openness to the world of magazines, and from that job I started working. I just wanted to work, I just wanted to live, I wanted to survive as a photographer. And so, nobody was buying my pictures in galleries, and they certainly weren't.

I mean, pictures were only 3 or $400, and it was very difficult to sell them. I couldn't survive off of them. But here was this opportunity to work for the most glamorous human being that I could think of.

Speaker 2: And as we get into

Speaker 1: the magazine years, I started photographing a lot of the people that made up the popular world of culture in the United States. Tupac Shakur and the next picture, Lil' Kim, as a luxury item. There were subtext to the pictures. I don't know if people got them or not at the time. I think now in retrospect with the new work, there's a little bit more light shined on what I was trying to do, but it was really questioning what was going on in America, the choices it was making, but the paradox was I

Speaker 2: was working for the same magazines. And so assignments kept coming in, this was my house,

Speaker 1: this was for French Vogue, and I was making a

Speaker 2: reference to Christo in this 1. It was the art issue. Suddenly art was in fashion, and it was the art issue, and

Speaker 1: I had to re-cover the house in pink. There's misconceptions about the manipulation that occurs or the digital compositing, and the only reason I defend that or wanted to film it to show the process. Because to me process is a little, it's too much emphasis on it these days. But instead of it being made by a machine, you know, the credit goes to my collaborators and my staff and the scenics and the painters

Speaker 2: and these people that make these things and

Speaker 1: these events occurred as you saw. It's the image of the cover of the book. There's very little done to it. I used retouching as a tool, digital retouching, as a tool to retouch, but in no way photo illustrations. You just can't create something out of thin air anyway.

It has to be photographed, and I don't enjoy

Speaker 2: sitting in front of a computer. I like the idea of the planning, the conception, and the shoots

Speaker 1: themselves are what really turns me on. I go to places that weren't chic. I'd go to the neighborhoods where all the houses look alike and everyone drives the same SUV. This is 1 of the last, last photographs I did for a fashion magazine. This was 1 of the last.

This was called Jesus is My Homeboy for ID. And ID even was like, Jesus? Like, oh, really?

Speaker 2: Oh, I don't know. And meanwhile, they don't even

Speaker 1: have any, you're working for free, plus you're paying all your expenses. It was getting more and more difficult to get my pictures published.

Speaker 2: And this series

Speaker 1: was this sort of idea, I saw Jesus as my homeboy on a t-shirt and all the fundamentalist Christians were talking about, well, what if Jesus came back? And, you know, well, he is coming back. And I thought, well, if he is coming back, who would he hang out with? Because he's certainly not gonna hang out with them. He's gonna hang out with the people he hung out with sort of like the first time, which were the outcasts, which were the disenfranchised, and the oppressed, and those were his apostles,

Speaker 2: and the people who thought differently. So I did this story and the only challenge was getting it published and getting the fashions in

Speaker 1: the magazine, but I made sure to get lots of advertisers' clothes in so this would be published. I'm using magazines sort of as the gallery. Magazines have become my gallery. This is

Speaker 2: a series later on, I'm skipping through decades of pictures here, but these are towards the end and

Speaker 1: I was dealing, I went through, I ordered on eBay family photographs and what I found was this theme of all these people drinking in every shot. So I called this Drunk Americans and I did it for Lema Vogue and I had to digitally add in people to these scenes and make it look like it was part of it. It was

Speaker 2: all about the military.

Speaker 1: It was during the Bush administration. That says, Bush kills, drop Bush, not bombs, on this old lady's sweatshirt.

Speaker 2: I just love that when she's drinking cocktails, she has a rifle.

Speaker 1: I felt the Americans were drunk with power at

Speaker 2: the time for getting everybody involved in this illicit war that's been dragging on. I mean,

Speaker 1: this is our Vietnam. And you know, just as

Speaker 2: a fashion artist, you don't have very much of a voice, and nobody expects political messages to be, you're not looking for that when you look for fashion or celebrity magazine. But I did have something I wanted to say. Next. So these images caused a little bit of a stir when they came out. Putting Kahlúa in the baby's bottle.

So this was 1 family's portraits, and everyone was just drinking of a storm, and I just felt, this idea of drunk with power, and this whole thing. But in every shot, there's little bits of militarism put into, as I

Speaker 1: got older, I was thinking about different things, thinking about these,

Speaker 2: about

Speaker 1: the world in a different way than I did when I was

Speaker 0: 20,

Speaker 1: when I was in my 30s. I was, you have different chapters in your life and you have to be true to that.

Speaker 2: You can't just repeat yourself and keep doing the same thing. You have to be honest. And I

Speaker 1: would always get my, People, where do

Speaker 2: you get your ideas? Where do you get ideas? Well, they come from within. I don't go looking for them. You sometimes just get this inspiration and it's a beautiful thing when you get it.

This next series was What Will You Wear in Heaven? The magazine rejected them.

Speaker 1: So I was getting stronger and stronger images, or messages, loud and clear that my pictures weren't really fitting into the magazine format anymore. This was

Speaker 2: the last series I ever did for a magazine, the last editorial. It's called house at the end of the world. You have

Speaker 1: to live under a rock not to feel and not to understand that things are changing, that we are at a time in the world's history that is precarious and the future is uncertain. Does that mean be fearful or be negative or be empathetic? No, it means do what you can and enjoy it. We're the children that inherited this world from the Industrial Revolution when it all started happening, when the population spiked with the discovery of fossil fuels. So it's not our fault that we're part of this system.

We could live in a cave or live in a rock and not make a carbon footprint, but we wouldn't really be living. But this whole system that everything is built on comes from oil.

Speaker 2: And it comes from

Speaker 1: fossil fuels. So here we are. We have this earth. And yet I'm working for fashion magazines and I want to talk about this thing that I can't get out of my head, this idea that the climate's changing. It's 1 way to exercise these fears is to photograph them.

Speaker 2: This is a series downstairs, Earth, Last and Flowers. We can go through these kind of quickly since you've probably seen the gallery show. The Venetas or the historical still lifes. I just, I

Speaker 1: love them. I love that they told stories, that the objects in the picture meant something. Even certain flowers, Certainly a cobweb would mean something. Everything in those Dutch still lives or the other historical still lives had a purpose or told a story, either about the person who commissioned it or about something else, and everything has a symbolic value. And today, with our disposable society, no 1 has the time to find out what those things mean, because we're so busy, and we have so much to go.

And we get our information from television. We get information from

Speaker 2: the internet, and from our phones, and

Speaker 1: our Twitters, and our clitters.

Speaker 2: And so it's sort of

Speaker 1: like the Venetas, or the still life, is sort of, And there's a lot of reasons I did these images. 1 was the chapters, the transience of life, and the finding beauty and joy in all those changes of life, because life is constant change. And like the Buddha says, the glass is already broken. The crystal glass is already broken. Either the wind knocked it over or your elbows are appreciated while it's still whole because it's already broken.

Speaker 2: And those kind of things resonate with me. And I believe all religions are rivers that lead to the same ocean.

Speaker 1: And they're not, they shouldn't be used as means to separate ourselves. It should be, they're more, they should be what they were intended for, to unify people. And the true essence is there's always a seed that is very much like different prophets and enlightened people speaking to different people of different ages. Using traditional symbolic things that you'd find on those tables in the forefront of a

Speaker 2: still life and mixing it with a modern. The disposability, somehow the symbolism doesn't become as important anymore. It's just sort of a mess now. It's just sort of

Speaker 1: a little less care because the things are more disposable. Back in our grandparents' time

Speaker 2: and our parents' time, Things were saved and things were lasted but you know greed runs the world and and and these are the same things the ancients We're dealing with

Speaker 1: the same thing the myth the the great mythologies of Greece are talking about We have evolved but with technologies and the speed of light that we travel and live at, but have we morally changed? No, because those same myths and stories and teachings of the prophets and the teachers are still true. Things that were written thousands of years ago still resonate today. You know, I'm an artist and sort of a calling as a young kid and this is just, you know, in a small way, my voice of just trying to

Speaker 2: get out what's going on

Speaker 1: in my head. I'm saying that a lot of contemporary doesn't speak to things that are happening. I go into a gallery, I'm like, What does this have to do with, I don't, you know, contemporary reflects the values of a society at any given time. Well, if it's reflecting our values, then we're really fucked, because it's all about the price of it, the status of owning it. I mean, every new Russian billionaire has a list of what, you know, Coons, Prince, Hearst, it's just a shopping list.

And it's a way of separating oneself from, you know, the other rich, like my yacht is bigger than your yacht, and I have this and I have that. And art is not just for that, it has another purpose as well. But what it is, I hope that the pendulum swings the opposite way now and that art will start to reflect a little bit more of, you know, give people some nourishment of what things will, you know, nourish us instead of just confuse us and add

Speaker 2: to the confusion and be

Speaker 1: a mirror of our times. Maybe they'll enlighten us as well. And The great thing about art is that we're all entitled to our own opinions about things, you know?

Speaker 2: And that's our own interpretations and opinions. Thank you.

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David LaChapelle's Earth Laughs In Flowers Lecture at Robilant + Voena, London. 14th February 2012