About

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David LaChapelle has spent his career photographing the real thing. At seventeen, he moved to New York, and after his first show at Gallery 303, Andy Warhol hired him for Interview Magazine. He became the photographer the biggest names wanted in front of their faces: Madonna, Michael Jackson, Leonardo DiCaprio. 

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When he heard that the National Wax Museum in Dublin had been vandalized, he went to see the copies. Smashed, stored in boxes, many of them stand-ins for people he had once photographed in person. He shot them where they lay. Between 2009 and 2012, he followed the trail to wax museums in California and Nevada. The result is “Still Life”: over 30 motifs, from Elvis Presley to Princess Diana to severed hands that stand entirely on their own.

Presidents, revolutionaries, pop stars, actors: in wax, they all end up in the same state. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Gorbachev and Khomeini hang next to Heath Ledger and Princess Diana, and next to “Anonymous Politicians,” a heap of heads and hands in which nobody is identifiable anymore. Wax cracks, yellows and breaks no matter whose face it carries. LaChapelle was drawn to exactly that gap between copy and original: a likeness made to look like someone, onto which we project the real person anyway. Politicians make the gap especially visible. “The need for politicians to look good- all these ideas are part of what I find intriguing about wax.” Once the head is smashed, only the surface is left.

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Years in the magazine business left LaChapelle with a phrase he couldn’t shake. “The idea of people becoming ‘irrelevant,’ a term I heard thrown about when working for magazines, this disturbed me — an expiration date put on the commercial viability of an actor or pop star.” In the wax museum, that idea gets a filing system. At the Hollywood Wax Museum, the heads in the storage room were officially listed as “Retired.” And the material doesn’t hold out either: even wax skin ages and decays.

Not everything was hit equally. Some figures were smashed, others left alone, Diana among them. Who do we preserve? Who do we destroy? And why? The vandalism turned into an unplanned cultural verdict. Behind it sits a darker question: why does a culture that loves building its idols enjoy watching them fall so much? The tabloids are part of the answer, and Michael Jackson was the case that sharpened it for LaChapelle.

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The series has a direct predecessor in “Earth Laughs in Flowers,” where the classic flower still life becomes a study of beauty that burns bright and doesn’t last. “Still Life” takes that idea from flowers to faces. A smaller series from the same years, “Last Supper,” 13 works with Jesus and the twelve apostles, pushes it further: floating heads, detached hands, the same language of fragment and object. It isn’t part of this exhibition, but it belongs to the same thought. Even the oldest, most untouchable icons are made of something that breaks down.

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Formally, the works are still lifes in the classical sense: fragments carefully arranged, photographed like objects. Only the people they stand for refuse to stay still. They live on in the news, in ideologies that outlasted them, or didn’t. “Still Life” was first shown at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York in 2012 and at Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris in 2013. It now arrives here, with one question: what’s left of power and fame once the facade cracks?

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