Mariah Carey Connection

In less than 12 hours, Mariah Carey will arrive at David LaChapelle’s Los Angeles studio to be photographed for her Christmas album. LaChapelle chastises himself for telling me (“it’s meant to be a secret”), then shrugs: “Well, I’ve told you everything else.” We’ve been together all day at his home, by his pool, in his bedroom and now at his cacophonous, warrenous workspace, ricocheting this way and that around a life of sex, death, celebrity, drugs, depression, art, disco and — he insists — miracles.

On a series of stage sets, as his friend Michael Jackson’s songs pound from the music system, LaChapelle’s team are garlanding fake windows with lights and arranging presents under a hideous silver tree. LaChapelle’s close friend Sharon Gault, Madonna’s former make-up artist (and his “unofficial wife”), is organising food. Carey, says LaChapelle, “isn’t a diva. She never pisses on the little people.” There is a graffitied city backdrop of night-time blues and sulphurous yellows. Fake snow is in bags. “That’s pretty,” I say, looking at wooden cutout reindeer. “Mariah wanted real ones,” LaChapelle says, rolling his eyes. The boyish 47-year-old photographer is in jeans, scrappy T-shirt and hoody and speaks in a spacey Californian drawl. “Flown from Nebraska. Can you imagine, real reindeer?”

Well, yes, we can imagine. LaChapelle is famed for his gaudy, extravagant, some have claimed grotesque and empty, celebrity portraits; although he says he has mostly given them up, and now takes pictures only of favourites such as Carey and Lady Gaga.[...]

His first magazine portraits were black and white, the predominant style of the time. Where did his trademark high- colour, deranged aesthetic come from? “It’s so grey in England. For English magazines I thought colour, lots of it, screaming Hollywood, California, would be cool. The top photographers then were known for black and white and grunge was happening. I wanted to do something different. I never want to make someone look bad. I’m living my fantasy through those pictures of fame, beauty, glamour and stardom. I want them to look larger than life.” Celebrities trust him [only Jeff Goldblum, “like, whatever”, turned him down]. The pictures and pop videos may be wild, but he says that he didn’t drink or take drugs on set, “although we had a blast” he laughs, recalling one Mariah Carey shoot in the middle of nowhere in which some strippers in a club tearfully told the star that they had named their children after her, and LaChapelle got it on with a guy in the back of a limousine who, afterwards, looked up and said, “I’m not gay and I’ve never been in a limousine”.[...]

At about 1am, Mariah preparations wind down. LaChapelle is going out (“just for a minute or two”) to a club. He grimaces at his photographs being described as camp or kitsch. “They’re just words which mean people don’t want to look. I’ve seen people stop and look at my work in galleries. Not just at the bodies, the genitalia, but really look.” If he’s the cartoonist his critics claim he is, he’s a serious one and obviously happier with his work on gallery walls than in magazines. But you know that, through his lens, snowflakes whirling and tinsel shimmering, Mariah will never look more Christmassy — even if the reindeer aren’t real.

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Source: The Time | Thanks to Gold