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David LaChapelle Portrait Photography

American, b. 1969

David LaChapelle's highly polished, saturated and intricately composed photographs possess the surreal wildness of fever dreams, concocted as they are out of the imagery of celebrity, eroticism and modern Americana, and spiked with religious allegory and forebodings of doom.

Such work has made him among the most influential art and celebrity photographers of his generation. You might say LaChapelle sprung straight from the head of Andy Warhol, whose campy silkscreen fusions of the glamorous, the transgressive and the everyday forever changed contemporary art.

Like so many young gay artists who came out of the 1980s downtown New York scene, LaChapelle’s escapist visions arose out of a lonely, bullied adolescence. Although born in Connecticut, the photographer spent his early childhood in North Carolina, the youngest of three children. Later, when LaChapelle was in his early teens, his family moved back to suburban Connecticut, but his cowboy costumes and gender-bending ways did not earn LaChapelle friends among his new preppy classmates.

By high school, LaChapelle felt terrorized and suicidal. He fled to New York, where his good looks got him a job bussing tables at Studio 54. It was there that he reputedly first met Warhol, who had been his favorite artist since he first gazed upon a Gold Marilyn, while on a fourth-grade field trip to a museum.

LaChapelle's parents eventually retrieved him from New York, and, sympathizing with his plight, sent him off to the North Carolina School of the Arts. Despite a more embracing atmosphere, he didn’t stay long. A sojourn in London followed. When he returned to New York, around 1983, the punk-inflected downtown culture was churning out gritty new art. Keith Haring’s gay-themed Pop-art graffiti was in everybody’s face, and Robert Mapplethorpe’s S&M photos were on gallery walls.

Having scored a show of his black-and-white photography — already vaguely campy and transfiguration-obsessed — at New York’s then-fledgling 303 Gallery in 1984, LaChapelle attracted the interest of Interview magazine. Warhol was then at the zenith of his influence in both the art world and the downtown scene. Recognizing LaChapelle’s potential as an eye-catching celebrity photographer, he put him on staff, providing him with the creative milieu where his distinctive talent might develop.

There were editorial assignments for i-D, The Face and later for Vanity Fair, Vogue Paris and Rolling Stone. He also made excursions into advertising. One of his most talked about campaigns was a provocative print ad for Diesel jeans inspired by the famous photograph of the V-J kiss in Times Square, but this time showing Tom of Finland–type sailors in passionate embrace.

After being without an editorial home for several years, LaChapelle finally found a base at Details, where he was again encouraged to let his freak flag fly. So arresting were his images that it wasn’t long before “the Fellini of photography,” as New York magazine dubbed him in 1996, was again working for Interview. One of his most emblematic pictures from this era was a Lil’ Kim cover for that magazine, featuring the rapper’s nude body emblazoned with Louis Vuitton insignia (one of the most famous logos in luxury fashion).

Such visually zany, socially astute portraits prompted Richard Avedon to liken LaChapelle to a photographic Magritte, while also winning him invitations to direct music videos for such talents as Christina Aguilera, Moby and Amy Winehouse.

Find a collection of original David LaChapelle photography today on 1stDibs.

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Artist: David LaChapelle
Archangel Uriel
By David LaChapelle
Located in New York, NY
David LaChapelle Archangel Uriel 1985/2022 Signed and numbered on label, verso Archival pigment print (Edition of 500) 16 x 12 inches Contact gallery for price.
Category

1980s Contemporary David LaChapelle Portrait Photography

Materials

Archival Pigment

Elizabeth Taylor: National Velvet
By David LaChapelle
Located in New York, NY
Elizabeth Taylor: National Velvet 2002/2022 Signed and numbered on label, verso Archival pigment print (Edition of 500) 10 x 16 inches Contact gallery for price. This work is of...
Category

Early 2000s Contemporary David LaChapelle Portrait Photography

Materials

Archival Pigment

Vulgar Tears, Paris, 1995
By David LaChapelle
Located in New York, NY
Edition of 10 + 3 Artist's Proofs
Category

1990s David LaChapelle Portrait Photography

Materials

Archival Pigment

David and Amanda, New York
By David LaChapelle
Located in New York, NY
Amanda Lepore’s birth name was Armand Lepore. In the early 1980’s, three decades before transgender rights became a social issue, she began her devotion to the plastic surgery that would transform her in to a downtown New York icon and frequent muse to photographer David LaChapelle. Filmmaker Joel Schumacher has called Lepore a “moving sculpture...
Category

Early 2000s Modern David LaChapelle Portrait Photography

Materials

C Print

Fish Stick: Devon Aoki in Agent Provocateur, London
By David LaChapelle
Located in New York, NY
Edition of 7 + 3 Artist’s Proofs Signed by the photographer
Category

1990s Modern David LaChapelle Portrait Photography

Materials

C Print

Rebirth of Venus
By David LaChapelle
Located in New York, NY
Sandro Botticelli’s iconic painting The Birth of Venus (click here) was created in the late 15th century and depicts the mythological origin of the goddess Aphrodite (known also as Venus, the goddess of love and sex), who was born an adult woman from sea foam. Although this myth was very popular with artists beginning in the 16th century, Botticelli’s painting...
Category

Early 2000s Modern David LaChapelle Portrait Photography

Materials

C Print

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Rebecca, Tiffany Vase, Large Scale Sheila Metzner Photograph
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Sheila Metzner’s unique photographic style has positioned her as a contemporary master in the worlds of fine art, fashion, portraiture, still life and landscape photography. Looking at Metzner’s photographs is a captivating experience. Innocent, sensual, and sexual, each photo, regardless of subject, exhibits and elicits deep emotion. It is nearly impossible to just glance at Metzner’s photos; they beg to be studied. She says, “Photography in its most basic form is magic…This image, caught in my trap, my box of darkness, can live. It is eternal, immortal. The child in the image will not age as the living child will.” Sheila Schwartz was born in 1939 to an orthodox Jewish family in a poor section of Brooklyn. While attending the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan (now the High School of Art and Design), she was awarded the Mayor Robert F. Wagner scholarship to the college of her choice. She chose Pratt Institute, where she majored in visual communication. Her fondness for painting and sculpture also led her to study with abstract artists Jack Tworkov and James Brooks. After graduating in 1961, Sheila worked as an assistant to Lou Dorfsman at CBS Network Advertising. Five years later, she was hired by the Doyle Dane Bernbach advertising agency as its first female art director, and in 1968 she met and married director, creative director, and painter Jeffrey Metzner. While pregnant with their first child, she was riding in a cab with her mentor and friend, photographer Aaron Rose, discussing whether or not to give up her career in advertising. “He said, ‘You should be a photographer. You live like an artist. You have a good eye, you’d be good at it.’ ” Metzner started taking pictures, amassing them slowly over the next 13 years, while raising her and Jeffrey’s five children—Raven, Bega, Ruby, Stella and Louie. Jeffrey’s two daughters from a previous marriage, Evyan and Alison, were also a regular part of the family. “When they were really small, I’d be with them during the day, photographing and printing at night. At eight or nine in the evening, when they were all asleep, I’d take a shower to wake up and put on high heels and lipstick, which I wore then, to give me the feeling of being ready to work.” She continues, “My children never interfered. When I couldn’t travel because of them, I would find a place in upstate New York and call it Antarctica or Egypt. I found microcosms.” Nine years later, Metzner had accumulated a box of 22 pictures. One of them, a black-and-white photograph titled “Evyan, Kinderhook Creek,” caught the eye of John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, which he included in his famous and controversial exhibition “Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960.” The New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer loved the picture and soon it became the dark-horse hit of the exhibition. Later that year, Metzner’s first solo show at the Daniel Wolf Gallery in New York drew record crowds. Metzner was now ready to work in color, but not just conventional color. Of her subjects, she once said, “If I use a rose, I want it to be the essential rose—the rose Beauty brought to her father from the Beast’s garden.” Now she aspired to an essential kind of color. “I wanted something that would last. I was looking for Fresson even though I didn’t know they existed.” The Fresson family works outside of Paris and specializes in a labor-intensive four-color “process de charbon” method, which they invented in 1895. 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I wasn’t just producing photographs for the art world.” Of Sheila’s foray into fashion, critic Carol Squiers says, “At a time when fashion photography was caught between sterility and the snapshot, Metzner created a sumptuous vision that stimulated the entire field.” Metzner also started doing commercial photography around this time. Her first client was Valentino, soon to be followed by Bloomingdale’s, Perry Ellis, Revlon, Shiseido, Saks Fifth Avenue, Paloma Picasso, Victoria’s Secret, Levi’s, Ralph Lauren, and fragrances for Chloe and Fendi (the Fendi campaign won a Fragrance Foundation Recognition Award). Her work also appeared on John Mellencamp...
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Slim Aarons 'Capucine'
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Faye Dunaway at the Beverly Hills Hotel (Oscar Ennui), Printed Later
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Jerry Garcia, Grateful Dead
By Herb Greene
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Terry O'Neill, Faye Dunaway by the Pool
By Terry O'Neill
Located in New York, NY
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Jerry Garcia, Grateful Dead, 1964
By Herb Greene
Located in New York, NY
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Previously Available Items
Archangel Uriel
By David LaChapelle
Located in New York, NY
David LaChapelle Archangel Uriel 1985/2022 Signed and numbered on label, verso Archival pigment print (Edition of 500) 16 x 12 inches Contact gallery for price.
Category

1980s Contemporary David LaChapelle Portrait Photography

Materials

Archival Pigment

Addicted to Diamonds
By David LaChapelle
Located in Kansas City, MO
David LaChapelle Title: Addicted to Diamonds Medium: C-Print Size: 24 x 20 inches Year: 1997 Edition: 27 + 5 APs Signed by artist David LaChapelle (born March 11, 1963) is an Americ...
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1990s Contemporary David LaChapelle Portrait Photography

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Brook Shields: Whipped Cream
By David LaChapelle
Located in New York, NY
Brook Shields: Whipped Cream, 1995 Chromogenic print 24 × 20 in 61 × 50.8 cm Edition of 30
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1990s Contemporary David LaChapelle Portrait Photography

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Drew Barrymore: In Jail, aka. I've Seen Her, She Wants You to Know She is Happy
By David LaChapelle
Located in New York, NY
Drew Barrymore: In Jail, aka. I've Seen Her, She Wants You to Know She is Happy, 1995 Chromogenic print 24 × 20 in 61 × 50.8 cm Edition of 30
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1990s Contemporary David LaChapelle Portrait Photography

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David Lachapelle portrait photography for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic David LaChapelle portrait photography available for sale on 1stDibs. If you’re browsing the collection of portrait photography to introduce a pop of color in a neutral corner of your living room or bedroom, you can find work that includes elements of blue and other colors. You can also browse by medium to find art by David LaChapelle in archival pigment print, c print, pigment print and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 21st century and contemporary and is mostly associated with the modern style. Not every interior allows for large David LaChapelle portrait photography, so small editions measuring 12 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Rachel Lauren, Bruce Weber, and Mark Beard.
Questions About David LaChapelle Portrait Photography
  • 1stDibs ExpertMarch 22, 2022
    The style of David LaChapelle's photography is unique and unable to fit into one category. Some people consider his photography a form of Surrealism, while others classify it as hyper-real. He is especially well known for photographing celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Amanda Lepore. Shop a collection of David LaChapelle art on 1stDibs.

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