David LaChapelle is undoubtedly one of modern day photography’s greatest agent provocateurs, a man who has consistently encapsulated the pop cultural zeitgeist in his work on a level that can without doubt only be considered genius, every image a piece of Pop Art in itself. In the Nineties and early to mid Aughts, he was the go to guy for everybody who was anybody, capturing in his lense icons such as Alexander McQueen, Kurt Cobain, Tupac, Madonna, Naomi Campbell, Britney Spears, Pamela Anderson’ Lil Kim, his muse – infamous transexual Amanda Lepore, and an exhausting list of celebrities and fashion houses that goes on and on.
Turning his sleight of hand in recent years more to art and docu film, it is refreshing to see LaChapelle resurrect his signature brand of colourfully explosive and risque imagery in a series of photographs that comprise a campaign for Scandinavian sock brand Happy Socks. The campaign is fun, playfully irreverent, has little to nothing to do with socks, and features the bared skin of ridiculously attractive male and female dances aplenty whom he captures doing what they do best in a series of remarkable images that in vivid colour bring out the wild spirit of Hollywood & L.A. and all the glamour and sexual innuendo that goes with it. That is exactly what one would expect of David, and that is: Kitsch Pop Art perfection.