David LaChapelle Quotes

The industrial revolution fueled all of humanity, everything we do has been exploding ever since. It's been the biggest most impacting thing, not only for human beings in the last 250 million years, but also the planet, which caused the ice age, which buried the forest. It's this circle because of the industrial revolution, it's neither good or bad, it enabled all of modernization, extended our life, it changed everything. It's the most impactful thing that happened to the planet and the people.

If you watch Michael Jackson [1992] concerts from Budapest and compare it to a Madonna concert of today, you'll see such uplifting beauty and a message that you won't see in any other artist of our time.

I went to art high school and thought I'd be a painter. Unfortunately I didn't finish high school, but that's always been part of my work.

People say photographs don't lie, mine do.

You just do what you love, and then a style happens later on.

My dream since I was a kid was to show in a gallery.

I like thinking about the fragility of the human flesh and our bodies - our decay and eventual death.

If you want reality take the bus.

Pictures are an escape. They should be bigger than life. In the same way, celebrities provide an escape from the mundane. They are photographed so we can worship them - so they are worthy of our worship.

I'm part of what I consider the entertainment industry. For my photos to be entertaining, they have to be provocative and new.

We're bombarded with images. Take the time to stop and look at something then connect with them and maybe they're thinking the same thing, I used a lot of devices to catch the eye of people who have seen a lot of stuff, having worked in advertising and in editorial. I have learned to get someone to stop and look at something, that language.

I am not God. But I can only do my role here on this planet. The role I feel I was given since I was a kid was to be making art and I only wanted to give and I never let money be my God.

Every culture has beauty and decorations of body. This is not of itself superficial, this is very human. Decorating when it becomes out of balance, when it becomes about the materialism, about how many shoes, how many handbags, how expensive they are, and the status, then it's no longer just about an expression or looking beautiful, that's more about 'I HAVE MONEY, I AM RICH'. It felt out of balance.

I'm not condemning the Catholic Church - it's too big, it's like condemning a nation and that would be prejudiced.

It's much harder to work for yourself, by yourself, than to create work for a gallery, because there are no limits and you can do anything you want. It's always easier when you have a parameter, when you have a limit. You can work within the limit and push it and walk the line, but when you're given absolutely no limits, it's harder. You must really think. It's more challenging.

Prostitutes go to heaven. It's their clients that go to hell.

You work with people who are obsessive about shopping, obsessive about owning things and buying things, like this purchase is going to make them happy. And you want to say to them, You know, no amount of real estate is gonna fill that void.

I have no interest in being famous. I just want to make famous photographs.

I didn’t see any difference between being a photographer or being an artist. I didn’t make those boundaries. If someone wants to think it’s art, that’s great, but I’ll let history decide.

The cruelty, war and violence, this is evil, wrong and dark and that's what we should hide from the children, not a human body!

Then I got this idea in my head that magazines were like a gallery and if you got your magazine page ripped out and someone stuck it on their refrigerator, then that was a museum – someone’s private museum.

I believe in a visual language that should be as strong as the written word.

What I'm doing here is pointing out an irony: Here you have an institution that has systematically protected pedophile priests and then you have an innocent Michael Jackson, who California spent millions of dollars trying to prosecute and could not do it because it was complete bulls - t.

I never wanted to be famous. I always wanted to take famous photographs.

I wanted it to provide an escape route, I wanted to make pictures that were fantastic and took you into another world, one that was brighter. I started off with this idea.

There's nothing that symbolizes loss or grief more than a mother losing a child.

We have the ability to make the connection, make the time to pray and meditate. We have to find our inner voice that will guide us. But we can only find it if we get quiet.

The adornment of the body is a human need.

I love when people write about something, I learn what I'm doing through the eyes of a good critic, positive or negative. It's still a learning experience.

What's shocking is cruelty and torture, and that's become our entertainment. Kids can play violent video games, but God forbid they look at a naked woman. That's pornography, that's perverse. No!

The adornment of the body is a human need. I don't see anything superficial about it unless your life becomes very materialistic.

I believe Michael [Jackson] in a sense is an American martyr. Martyrs are persecuted and Michael was persecuted. Michael was innocent and martyrs are innocent. If you go on YouTube and watch interviews with Michael, you don't see a crack in the facade. There's this purity and this innocence that continued [throughout his life].

My pictures are about getting as far away from reality as possible. Dreams should be part of our everyday life.

I love fashion and beauty and all those things, I still do but I think that it has changed the shift, that the greed is ruling the planet right now.

With mania, is it dangerous to ride that euphoric feeling. You feel very animated and creative; I would fill journals with drawings. It feels good and you want it to last, but it can lead to being delusional. The delusions can be as real as you thinking you can fly.

The tools I learned photographing celebrities, now I want to use them to sell ideas.

People get devalued in Hollywood when they age, despite all their efforts to stay relevant and beautiful and young. They can't get jobs anymore.

I'll let criticism spoil breakfast, but I don't let it affect my lunch.

I think that the world is really in very dark ages. In America this could have never been showed, we are even more lost over there than in Europe. We are very lost!

My idea was that if I took a picture of somebody and years later, or whenever, they would die and if someone wanted to know who this person was, they could take one of these pictures and it would tell who the person was.

I like the consistency of having people in my life for a long time.

As you are working on ideas, you are in a bubble, working on your images. What's important to me in my work, I like this idea of communicating through a piece of art so works don't have to be exchanged. They're okay and they're helpful but most importantly that the image will convey something in my mind that I was trying to communicate and then you have that connection.

I like the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas more than the actual one.

The minute you point a camera at something, you are manipulating the image, because you are cropping out whatever is to the left and right of it. The minute you put a light on someone, you are manipulating the image.

Just as Renaissance artists provided narratives for the era they lived in, so do I. I'm always looking beyond the surface. I've done that ever since I first picked up a camera.

I'm a photographer, period. I love photography, the immediacy of it. I like the craft, the idea of saying 'I'm a photographer.'

In the fashion world, I was always an outsider, but I made people look good, so I had a career.

I was always painting when I was a kid. But then when I handled a camera when I was 17, that was it for me. I loved photography. I would work 4 or 5 hours a day. It was like a calling.