DAVID LACHAPELLE: “VANISHING ACT,” THE SACRED WITHIN THE SPECTACLE — INTERVIEW BY INDIRA CESARINE
At a time when the world feels increasingly unstable, overstimulated, and moving faster than language can keep up, David LaChapelle is preparing to unveil a body of work that asks us to slow down and to look longer. His new exhibition, Vanishing Act, opens at VISU Contemporary from November 29, 2025, through January 31, 2026, assembling more than 30 career-defining images and debuting nine new works that confront the precarious, accelerating moment we’re living through. Curated by VISU founder Bruce Halpryn, the show proposes beauty as a form of truth — and resistance — in a culture that too often looks away from both.
The public opening on December 5th, during Miami Art Week, marks a meaningful return. “The first time I went down there was for Andy Warhol for Interview Magazine when I was in my early twenties,” LaChapelle recalls. “There were two nightclubs and only one hotel on Ocean Drive renovated. You could feel that Andy was very prophetic.” The world hadn’t caught up yet — but Warhol sensed an electric undercurrent waiting to erupt. If Miami was once Warhol’s church, LaChapelle’s arrival now feels like the future he foresaw — a cinematic collision of glamour, spirituality, and cultural reckoning.
My first encounter with LaChapelle’s universe wasn’t through a gallery door — it was through a darkroom door. In the late ’90s, I printed my own photographic C-prints at Latent Image in Chelsea, directly next to his team. They worked with a kind of devotional rigor: if a print wasn’t perfect, it was destroyed. I still remember watching the images emerge from the machine, dripping with saturated drama and impossible imagination. Before those images ever hit magazine pages or gallery walls, they struck me — unforgettable, theatrical, alive.
Years later, I stood amongst a buzzing crowd at the Faena, as LaChapelle and Pamela Anderson transformed Gitano into an Art Basel Miami extravaganza for Lavazza’s “Earth CelebrAction” launch. But today, the conversation feels different: not spectacle for spectacle’s sake, but spectacle searching for a soul. The artist before me today is both visionary showman and earnest seeker, with both feet firmly planted in the earth he’s spent decades trying to understand.
Long before the pop stars, the magazine covers, and the museum-scale photographs, LaChapelle was a kid who liked making things by hand. “I grew up very much alone as a kid and spent a lot of time in the woods,” he tells me. “My parents always lived near or right on the edge of a forest… I spent a lot of time in the woods by myself playing as a kid, and I loved it.” There was no master plan — just creation. Just instinct.
He first moved to New York at 17, enrolling in the North Carolina School of the Arts as a painter before fate intervened. He exhibited his photography young — too young the first time he showed it to Interview Magazine — but when he held his next show at 21, they came. The pictures made an impact. And then the phone rang.
“Interview was the most important popular culture magazine in the world,” he says, reflecting on that moment with both awe and gratitude. “They loved photography. They ran double pages of full bleeds all the time.” Warhol — ever the oracle — saw the potential.
“They published some of those pieces and gave me that first assignment with a celebrity, which was The Beastie Boys. And then it was Eartha Kitt, and it was like this opened a door into magazines, which took on a life of its own in the nineties and exploded into another way to express myself — doing fashion and celebrity. I just wanted to take photos.”
The 1990s would crown LaChapelle as one of the most influential image-makers of his generation — the man who made the artificial feel truer than truth. His photographs became pop culture’s subconscious: bright, bold, surreal, alive with the chaos and glamour of fame.
But beneath the saturated surfaces, something quieter was forming.
Before Hollywood. Before Vogue. Before the editorial whirlwind. “There was an urgency then because I thought I was gonna die too,” he says, describing the era in New York when AIDS was ravaging his community. “Why would I not? I wanted to leave images behind. I wanted to have a purpose for being here. It wasn’t a legacy or something superficial — I really wanted to commemorate my friends who were dying.”
The work he made back then was not about celebrity — it was about heaven. Angels. Soul and salvation. Ladders up from the material plane. “So much was about what happens to us when we die,” he says. “I knew that there was something more to this life than just the material plane.”
Spirituality wasn’t adopted later — it was always the undercurrent. But as the world accelerated and his fame expanded, the urgency returned. “In the last 20 years, I’ve come back to those ideas a lot,” he tells me. “I feel that urgency once again to get these pictures out there because we are in such a precarious place in the world.” What used to be personal now feels collective.
LaChapelle’s career soared through the ’90s and 2000s as magazines and musicians grasped for his spellbinding storytelling — lavish, subversive worlds that walked a tightrope between satire and sincerity. He created the images that defined pop idols — not as mirrors, but mythology.
But while he embraced pop as a language, he never confused it with artistic purpose. He explains the duality with a metaphor he returns to often: “It’s like a swimming pool: you don’t just want to swim in the shallow end, or just the deep end — you want to swim in the whole pool, back and forth, not just one side all the time. That’s how life goes too.”
Celebrity brought the crowds to the door. The deeper works kept them in the room.
The pandemic, the climate crisis, and cultural fragmentation have altered the way we look at each other — and at art. LaChapelle feels that shift like a tremor beneath every photograph he now makes.
“So much pop culture goes dark,” he says. “On the streaming services, like Dahmer was one of the most streamed offerings ever in Netflix history — it’s about a serial killer. Those people, those families who that affected personally, are still alive. This is not entertainment. It’s evil.”
He isn’t angry — he’s concerned. “I really don’t believe that watching people suffering is entertainment or should be entertainment. I think we really have to look at that.”
And then the quiet conviction: “What we feed our eyes and ears is as important as what we eat.”
For LaChapelle, this is not academic philosophy. It’s a responsibility. “It’s harder to go towards beauty and not have it be trite or just decorative… to make something that actually means something — it’s a challenge,” he says. “But people will stop and look at things that are beautiful longer; they’ll stay there long enough to hopefully understand the message that I’m trying to communicate.”
The title of the exhibition, “Vanishing Act,” came to LaChapelle during a moment of clarity.
“You hear a lot of people talking about how much better things were before COVID, or when they were younger — another time, another place,” he tells me. “And yes, things are vanishing. There are things that we had before that are scarcer today, or the way people treat each other has changed.”
What’s disappearing isn’t just social grace — it’s grounding.“We all realize we’re in a new chapter in the world and there are some things that are gone,” he says. “But there’s still so much beauty and love and goodness, and I want to really focus on those things.”
This exhibition does not moralize. It observes. It warns. It hopes. He points to one of the new works, Will the World End in Fire, Will the World End in Ice, revisiting the cruise ship metaphor from Spree — a frozen vessel drifting in a warming sea.
“We’re just partying, music’s playing, the lights are all on, everyone’s… and the ice is melted around the Arctic,” he explains. “It was this idea that Rome’s burning and we’re playing the fiddle, and life’s going on as normal, but just a few miles away so many people have lost their homes. We’re just going on: ‘Oh, business as usual,’ but it’s not.”
He pauses. The stakes are clear. “We all feel that something’s different.”
The new Negative Currency works — glowing inversions of global banknotes — reflect fragile systems of value. Tower of Babel (2024) stages digital-era chaos: everyone speaking; no one listening.
Images become parables. Work like this isn’t just meant to be seen — it’s meant to be received. “For me, when you communicate with that other person through art, that’s when the piece is finished,” he says. “That’s when the work is done: when you’re connecting with another person.”
Surrealism is often simulated these days — copied, collaged, digitally conjured. Not for LaChapelle.
“Analog. Analog, analog thinking,” he insists. “No matter what the means are to get there, I still think analog.” He builds his worlds by hand. He draws, constructs, stages, and lights — then captures the moment as it truly existed. “I don’t want to sit in front of a computer and just put stuff together all day,” he says. “I want the image to be there when we shoot.”
He compares shoot days to grand opening nights: “People at the end of our shoots applaud and cheer sometimes, because it is like opening night,” he explains. “We’ve worked and built and cast, and we’re working up towards this opening night, and then you have the opening night and you take the picture and it’s like the performance.”
Even still, he stays nimble. He loves returning to his roots — one assistant, natural discovery. “That’s how I used to shoot for 10 years when I first started, in black and white,” he says. “I would just discover the scenes and the scenarios.”
Scale doesn’t dictate depth. Intention does. “You can look inside my exhibition and you can’t tell which pictures were shot on digital or which were shot analog, because the thought is the same, and the work that went into them is the same. That hasn’t changed.”
After years in the fashion machine — flights, deadlines, constant production — LaChapelle felt something break. He needed quiet. He needed nature — the woods that had raised him.
“When my parents died, I needed to find that for myself,” he says softly. So he left. He moved to Maui. “It’s been 21 years now,” he says. “All the trees I planted back then are fully mature; they’re orchards and everything. The trees — everything grows so fast out there because of the volcanic soil and the rain.”
He describes the island with reverence — a sanctuary that restored balance. “There was a time I was so busy working with magazines and fashion that I didn’t have time to stop and think about things that really mattered,” he reflects. “I was just flying on planes all the time. So I’m playing catch-up right now and having that time to have more balance in my life, and through that balance I can make better pictures. They’re even stronger today than they were.”
His prayers as a young artist — a cabin, a camera, enough to eat — were answered there. “I love the water and I love the trees,” he says. “It really gives me space to contemplate and have retrospect in my life.”
Creativity needs stillness, and Maui gave that to him. “It just balances me out,” he says. “Having that time alone in the woods really gives me balance.”
But he never fully retreated. One foot remains in the world — shooting musicians, working with his team, engaging the culture he critiques. The duality fuels the work. “I’m a human being and I love music, and I love being in the world — not just cloistered in this art world, but also having one foot in the world of popular culture,” he says.
The images in “Vanishing Act” are lush, colorful, almost seductive — not to distract, but to disarm.
“It’s easy to go dark — it comes more naturally for us human beings, for some odd reason,” he admits. “But to really make things using beauty and not have it be trite or just decorative, to make something that actually means something — it’s a challenge.”
He sees beauty as a messenger, a vessel. “If I’m going to make a picture like that, I want it to mean something. I want it to touch people.”
His art doesn’t demand spiritual belief — only spiritual attention.“This is the time that, if ever we were to look for something deeper, a spiritual way, or to change the course of our lives, how we behave, how we treat one another — now is the time.”
The fire is not abstract. The call is now. “I think time is precarious,” he says. “I think there is an urgency right now to get these pictures out into the world because they mean something to me.”
He laughs when he notes that he and his team now pray together before shoots.“It’s really wild,” he says. “But it wasn’t planned like that. We didn’t meet at a church or something; it just happened really naturally. All these diverse people from all different walks of life, but we all have a shared love of God.”
His faith isn’t doctrine — it’s grounding. “I didn’t always have that,” he says. “But today, I can’t imagine a life without that connection.”
LaChapelle doesn’t pretend his pop images are profound — he simply recognizes their role.
“Those pictures may not be as deep or have the same resonance that the pictures I do for myself carry,” he says. “But celebrity does bring attention… celebrated people of popular culture, voices of the people.”
He doesn’t disown his past. He evolves it. “I’ve really come back full force with those [early] ideas and themes that I was working on in my early twenties,” he says. “I feel like I’m doing my best work — I kind of get out of the way and let the process happen through me.”
What connects the work across decades is that the eye has not changed. The urgency has. “I don’t want to just be merchandising more stuff,” he tells me. “I want to make pictures that touch people and move them.”
He believes art can be a compass when the map seems lost. “We all feel that we’re in a different chapter right now,” he says. “It feels different than it did 10 or 20 years ago.”
The pictures ask: What disappears when the noise gets too loud? What remains when the lights go out?
VISU Contemporary’s collaboration with LaChapelle signals its growing cultural importance — a young gallery entrusted with major new works by a global icon. As Halpryn puts it, the exhibition underscores Miami’s evolution into an art world capital.
For LaChapelle, returning to Miami is both historic and hopeful — a chance to exhibit not only where he has been, but what he believes is possible. “I want pictures that are the opposite of darkness,” he says. “I want to create images of light and beauty.”
That may be the real vanishing act: beauty as truth in an age of distraction.
Walking through “Vanishing Act” feels like stepping inside a temple built from pop culture — a place where neon meets prayer, decadence faces judgment, and apocalypse makes room for grace. It isn’t nostalgia for what’s gone — it’s a call to recognize what we still have time to save.
LaChapelle isn’t telling us everything is okay. He’s telling us to look — really look — and decide what deserves our faith.
Because in a world going numb, looking longer becomes a radical act. And beauty — real beauty — might just be what keeps us awake.
“Vanishing Act” is on view November 29, 2025, through January 31, 2026, at VISU Contemporary in Miami Beach. A public opening celebration with David LaChapelle will take place on December 5, 6–9 p.m.
