David LaChapelle's New Paris Show Nods to Andy Warhol and Renaissance Painting

For the past ten years, Pop Art photographer David LaChapelle has been living off the grid in Maui, Hawaii. It’s a shift of gears for LaChapelle, a New York staple, a man best known for his celebrity portraits. But his latest solo exhibition, "Letter to the World", which opened this weekend at Galerie Templon in Paris, covers both realms: the earthly and the divine.

The island’s tropical rain forest is at the core of his new photographs, which show Amanda Lepore as a Virgin Mary figure, parading around lush, Hawaiian greenery. "New World," as the series is called, looks like an acid trip through the Bible. LaChapelle has put technicolor garb on his cast of models to reveal an earthly paradise that takes its cues from Renaissance iconography. But here in Europe’s prettiest city, art history has certainly helped shape the photographer’s vision. “I think knowing art history, really, is how I built style,” LaChapelle said. “I just did what I was attracted to.”

He cites Christianity and Buddhism as influences on his latest photo series, which tie into his own outlook. “I have strong spiritual beliefs,” he said. “It has helped me throughout my life.” It’s fitting, considering his latest work is a trippy ride through what feels to be poetic proverbs. One piece, called The First Supper, has Lepore holding a baby among a swath of naked hipsters, while another called State of Consciousness, features a George Harrison-like figure standing upright like a Greek god. It all dates back to one photo in the exhibit—a black-and-white portrait of Warhol that ran Interview magazine, which is where LaChapelle got his start in the 1980s. “I was young and so impressionable,” said LaChapelle of his early career. “I learned a lot about the fickleness of the art world and how the people treated Andy at the time—when he died, people thought, Oh, we’ll rediscover him as this genius, but he was dismissed in New York.”

Warhol’s own accessibility may have worked against him, according to LaChapelle, who saw the industry’s silver lining from behind the scenes. “A lot of the idea of the art world operates on inaccessibility,” he said. “Things that are rare or hard to get. When things are too accessible, it’s not valued.” There are rare images in this exhibit, too. The earliest pieces include analog prints from the early 1980s, showing religious portraits where the artist painted on the negatives, similar to the technique in this new work. Some even look like angels, which is a recurring theme in his work, be it from his "Angels, Saints, and Martyrs" series to his winged portrait of Michael Jackson.

“I photographed angels back in the 1980s when everyone was dying from AIDS and was wondering what happened to them, and I think the ancients had it right when they depicted the soul as a winged figure,” said LaChapelle. “Photographing the unphotographable: That’s something I’ve enjoyed doing since way back.” LaChapelle has always seen photography as a way to give—whether its making us laugh, gaze at its colorful amazement, or ponder the afterlife.

“I wanted to create and give images that touch people in the same way music touches people; that’s how I look at it,” he said. “I’m not inspired to do a show for the sake of having a show, but to put something in the world that wasn’t there before.”