In a new interview with famed photographer David LaChapelle…. he let’s on that he is working on a photoshoot for a Mariah Carey Christmas album. Check out the excerpt from UK publication Times Online below:
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.
