David LaChapelle

Over the course of his 30+ year career, LaChapelle continues to be inspired by everything from art history to street culture, from the metaphysical to immortality, projecting an image of twenty-first century pop culture through his work that is both loving and critical. Always aware of larger social implications, LaChapelle’s work transcends the material world. He is quite simply the only photographic artist working today who has been able to successfully maintain a profound impact in the realm of celebrity photography as well as the notoriously discerning contemporary art intelligentsia.

David LaChapelle is known internationally and in Israel as a photographer, a director of documentaries, and a video artist whose colorful, smooth and extroverted style is filled with sensuality, fantasy, and dark adventure, packed with accessible popular images, and communicates with a wide and variegated audience.

Albeit daring, the nudity in these photographs does not result from him being trigger-happy, nor from an attempt to surprise and shock. Even in his commercial photographs, LaChapelle combines criticism of the marketing method whose objects are all those taking part in its constitution, including the target audience (of both the marketed product and the photograph as an object), and even the photographer himself as the one who creates the bait of the sales scheme.

LaChapelle does not sanctify the erotic facet in order to satisfy the voyeuristic urge or the curiosity of an audience of viewers and fans; he prefers to celebrate the freedom to use it precisely in order to liberate the representation of the body, primarily the female body, from the pornographic context, from erroneous interpretation, and from the inevitable association of nakedness with sin, or the mechanical association of passion and lust with sexual gratification, abuse, and humiliation.

Most of the photographed subjects in the exhibition are neither actors, singers, or major glamorous figures, but rather models whose very anonymity makes for a criticism devoid of gossipy preaching, of ascription to a specific figure or episode; criticism directed at a social moral content which converses with life and the art world.

Kanye West - boxing

Denotation - Kanye West is wearing a red boxing costume with white boots. The background is black which contrasts with the white floor. Also there is two spotlights which allow him to stand outs and show his shape and form. He is looking directly at the camera whilst in a boxer stance

Connotation - He is in-fact imitating the famous picture taken of Mohammed ali as he stands in the same stance. By relating the two pictures you can see that kanye's expression seems much more forced, passive and unnatural whereas Ali's is natural and seems passionate.