David LaChapelle Quotes

I shoot fantasy. If you want reality, ride the bus

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

As an artist you have a choice. You can add more confusion and darkness to the world or you can shine a light, make a beauty.

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

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

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

People say photographs don't lie, mine do.

My work is about making candy for the eyes. It's about grabbing your attention. Even though my work is appearing in magazines I am trying to make a large picture. I want my photographs to read like a poster.

I think we're in a post-pornographic time and nothing seems shocking, but everything remains carnal no matter what you do.

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.

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

My biggest advice would be to take the pictures you want to take. Don’t think about the marketplace, what sells or what an editor might say. And don’t think about style. It’s all bullshit and surface stuff. Style happens.

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

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.

If you want reality take the bus.

I have this idea that you can use glamour and still have it represent something that matters.

My work is about making candy for the eyes. It's about grabbing your attention.

There are going to be people doing the talking and people who get talked about, choose, which one do you want to be?

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

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 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 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.

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.

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 had this duality growing up with my dad being a strict Catholic and his brother being a priest and my mother finding God in nature, so I've taken a little from both [traditions].