54°
LaChapelle, who has owned a home in Fairfield, turns 53 on Friday. The fine art photographer was born March 11, 1963, in Fairfield.
When LaChapelle was 17, he met Andy Warhol, who offered him his first job as a photographer at Interview magazine. His photographs of celebrities in Interview garnered positive attention and before long he was shooting for a variety of top editorial publications.
His images subsequently appeared on the covers and pages of magazines such as Details, GQ, i-D, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Face, Vanity Fair, Vogue Italia, and Vogue Paris.
His commercial photographs have been collected in a number of books such as "LaChapelle Land" (1996), "Hotel LaChapelle" (1999), "Heaven to Hell" (2006) and "LaChapelle, Artists and Prostitutes" (2006).
His work has been noted as being, “meticulously created in a high-gloss, color-popping, hyper-realistic style,” and his photos are known to, “crackle with subversive – or at least hilarious – ideas, rude energy and laughter."
Themes in his art photography, which he has developed in his Maui retreat, include salvation, redemption, paradise and consumerism. His fine art work frequently features models/muses: Amanda Lepore and Katie Johnson.
His interest in film led him to make the 2004 short documentary "Krumped," an award-winner at the Sundance Film Festival.
He has exhibited his works at many one-man shows around the world, including the Barbican Museum in London (2002), Palazzo Reale in Milan (2007), Kestner Gesellschaft in Germany (2009) and the Tel Aviv Museum of Contemporary Art in Israel (2010), from which he received the honor of Artist of the Year in 2011.
Also recently, major retrospectives of his work have been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei (2010), Museum of Contemporary Art in Puerto Rico (2011), Hangaram Museum in Korea (2012), Rudolfinum Gallery in Prague (2011/2012), and the Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm (2012/2013).
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