I’ve been having major problems with my net connection all day, so I’m going to quickly put this entry up without a lot of my chatter to take advantage of this possibly small window of things being stable. Thanks to Kelley for bringing the material commentary to my attention.
The celebrity photographer and artist David LaChapelle had always wanted to take a portrait of Michael Jackson, and nearly did: several shoots were lined up and cancelled as Jackson grew increasingly wary. “Photographers weren’t nice to him,” says LaChapelle. “He got scared.”
After Jackson’s death LaChapelle decided to pay tribute, photographing a young lookalike in Hawaii, just outside his own home: a 25-acre ranch on the coast, three hours from the nearest shop. He moved there three years ago, turning his back on lucrative contracts with Vanity Fair, Italian Vogue and Rolling Stone. The “devil” in red is a friend who performs in the Cirque du Soleil. The image forms part of a trilogy inspired by Mexican saint cards. LaChapelle is convinced that Jackson was an innocent man.
“I don’t think he was capable of hurting anyone,” he says. “I think there’s something really biblical about what happened. His lyrics are so naive and so beautiful. It’s one of the most epic stories of our time, to go from such heights to such depths. He’s a modern-day martyr.”
LACHAPELLE: I have an image of Michael Jackson as an archangel, where I didn’t even photograph him. He was a person living in biblical extremes: the most famous person on the planet, beloved in an almost devotional way, who then fell almost to the lowest depths of society; going from a dark skinned black man to a pale skinned white man… and all the while singing these songs about healing!
In the Martin Bashir interview, there’s a kid with cancer without any hair. Then you see him later and he’s better, and his family said that it was Michael’s belief that cured him. Which, I’m Catholic, and healing the sick is one of the criteria for sainthood. Not to say that he really was a saint, but he was so otherworldly and certainly fits the requirements for martyrdom… He really brings into question all of these issues of gender and race, which are such hot button issues of society. Why can’t a man hold a child’s hand? Does it have to be erotic? I think that says as much about society as it does about him.
MILLER: So you created a portrait without Michael ever sitting for you? It sounds more like an effigy.
LACHAPELLE: For the picture I mentioned before, I used a Michael Jackson impersonator and spent weeks and weeks moving pixels around to create the face of Michael Jackson circa 1990. It’s a photograph, but it’s a not a portrait, so it sort of redefines what a photograph is. We spent so much time going back in and putting in details and flaws, and there’s no question that it’s Michael Jackson. But he never posed for it. It’s a very strange concept. In a way, it’s going back to painting. So it was time to go back to these more raw things like the collages.
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