Not in the traditional sense, in that I'm creating these things. His photos connect more to the visceral pleasures and terrors of the theater, and its origins in ancient religious sacrifice, than to the rather abstracted cerebral feelings usually aroused by film. LaChapelle's portraits do not celebrate celebrity so much as devour it. Of course, celebrity consumed returns as an indelible imago - a god ready to be eaten again and again. LaChapelle is clearly in touch with how this active process of deification works today.
Pictures are an escape.
They should be bigger than life. In the same way, celebrities provide an escape from the mundane. He speaks the last sentence in a camp-reverent tone which does not undercut its essential truth. No photographer's work has better exposed that orgiastic extremity of fame. All rights reserved.