In 2005, famed fashion photographer David LaChapelle released Rize, a chronicle of the evolution of krumping, a hyper-fast, volatile dance form--distant cousin of break dancing, twerking, African, and contemporary hip-hop dance--via footage from the lives of young pioneering dancers. Things get murky, however, when LaChapelle obscures the difference between documentary filmmaker and visual stylist, blurring the lines between authentic and artistic representation of his subjects. 

Contemporary American pop culture fascination and acceptance of krump is inextricable from its emergence through the hands of the famous fashion photographer.  It is doubtful that krumping, founded in the ghetto of East Los Angeles, or "Hollywatts," by ex-con entertainer "Tommy the Clown" would have made it to Missy Elliot's latest video without the help of a celebrity friend. Madonna, famous for her pop culture poaching, featured krump in multiple videos for her most recent album, Confessions on a Dance Floor. In the nineties, Madge ripped off "vogueing" from Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning (1990). Livingston, a no-name first time filmmaker, did not have the star power to launch vogueing onto the dance trend map. It was Madonna who acted as pop benefactor to vogueing. And so we must credit LaChapelle for exposing both niche and popular audiences to krump. 

But there are moments in the film that lead the viewer to question LaChapelle's directorial and editorial choices, making one suspect that LaChapelle's intentions are not as saintly as they may seem. Most of the documentary is filmed with a single camera on a steady-pack, the shots lit by natural light manipulated by the cunning director of photography, Morgan Susser. However, LaChapelle's styling cannot be ignored. At his most obvious, LaChapelle blatantly manipulates color, framing, and use of water and oil to visually glorify the dancers. There are also moments of subtly styling through camera and dancer placement that may escape the viewer but certainly affect the overall visual power of the film.  

Model Terrorists, LaChapelle

LaChapelle's legacy in the print photography world greatly influenced the critical reception and cultural reading of Rize.  LaChapelle is most known for his over-the-top portraits of celebrities, using vibrant color, outrageous setting, and interesting props to exaggerate the public/press image of the star he is photographing.  For example, he shot Paris Hilton dressed like a punk hooker in a posh living room, and Pamela Anderson as a life size Barbie doll. In 1999, LaChapelle published his most famous collection to date, Hotel LaChapelle. The work includes an afterword where LaChapelle summarizes the intention of his work. He writes personally, attempting to give some depth to his photos that seem to be all about surface. Reflecting on the worries that cross his mind during shoots, he writes: "Will the hotel kick me out because we’re shooting 'Model Terrorists Take Over Resort Wear' and we have blindfolded forty drunken, sunburned tourists on the hotel's beach?  Or will they get that this is my comment on the NRA's insane idea that more guns will make us safer: And if models were armed, then they could literally hold us hostage to impossible ideals of thinness and beauty." To most, it would be quite difficult "to get" LaChapelle's objective; the photograph seems to be making a comment on the obesity problem in America, and the disintegration of the nation's work ethic. Just a few years earlier, in "The World is Colourful," LaChapelle made the statement, "My work is honest because it is not parading itself as reality." This principle is certainly true for the Hotel LaChapelle collection as evidenced by his work for fashion magazines and music videos. In one sense, we can look at Rize as the antithesis of LaChapelle's photography; the production of everything that he is unable to do within the constraints of his photographic reputation. However, there are too many moments where the film echoes the objectified, shiny, "candyfloss color[ed]" images of his photography to substantiate a complete about-face for LaChapelle.

Pamela Anderson, LaChapelle

LaChapelle's fascination with the body, especially the black body, is evident in his catalogue of work. Probably the most poignant example of this is the shot of "Mr. Olympia Finalists." A group of men are photographed on a stage, their heads lost in a cloud of curtain, leaving them exposed from the neck down, oiled, and barely dressed in Speedos. Their only identification is a number that will be used to judge their appearance. The men are either very tan or black, glimmering in the light of the camera. Faceless, the men have no power to look back, to meet the gaze of their viewer. LaChapelle has completely turned the men into objects. Of course, the contestants are competing with their bodies, but LaChapelle has robbed them of their ability to connect with the audience, taking away any and all agency.

A similar photo was taken for a shoe spread in Paris Vogue. LaChapelle presents a very dark skinned black man standing in water, wearing an opaque astronaut helmet while dangling a red satin sandal by his forefinger. What is at first obvious is the deep chocolate skin contrasted against the blue of the water, silver of the helmet and red of the sandal and Speedo. Though the picture is meant to draw the viewer's eye to the shoe, the black body is what holds the audiences' attention. The dark skin is mesmerizing, the perfect musculature glowing in the bright and tropical setting. Yet the metal covered head gives him an extraterrestrial look, turning his beautiful body into something alien and extraordinary. Again, LaChapelle leaves the subject unable to defend himself, posing as a superhuman fantasy for viewers to ogle.

Shoe Story, LaChapelle

In other instances, LaChapelle taunts the viewer with overtly obvious works of subjugation, as is the case with "Hieronymus Bosch Love Affair." A woman sits forlorn, turned away from the oiled body of a black man whose buttocks acts as a holder for a vase. The title refers to 15^th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, who created scenes of immorality, evil, and the supposed causes for the fall of man. In LaChapelle’s picture, the black man is an object, either used lover or used furniture; both echo the "white supremacist practice" of using the black body as a tool for labor or pleasure. 

Hieronymous Bosch Love Affair, LaChapelle

It seems that LaChapelle is drawn not only to oiling the black body in order to showcase physique, but also to contrast black skin against bright color to create a visual magnet. This is all part of LaChapelle’s fascination with the surface: "When someone comes in to be photographed, I'm not so interested in capturing their soul through their eyes. I'm more interested in what they're wearing, how they have their hair done...There is a tradition of celebrity portraiture that attempts to uncover the 'real person' behind the trappings of their celebrity; I'm more interested in those trappings" (LaChapelle Land, 1996). And so to understand the critical reception of  Rize one must recognize the standard LaChapelle has set up: all surface, no depth.  Wesly Morris of Film Comment remarks that "LaChapelle creates simulacra for the famous. Some photographers and video directors use their cameras as x-rays intended to locate the hidden in a star, to ironize them. LaChapelle…has mastered the art of surface. His work is all ego and epicurism. Brightly colored and alluringly synthetic, it's as succulent as a lollipop." 

Rize reflects a moment when LaChapelle is trying desperately to pull himself out of the wake left by his previous work, but even at his most self-conscious, he cannot help but to enhance the exterior of what he sees (LaChapelle Land): "Why not just go into the middle of what’s all around us and try to find the beauty there. In fact, not just find the beauty, but make it beautiful. Enhance it. Change the way you look at it. When you take a picture of something, you change the way it’s seen." If it is true that LaChapelle did not have to enhance anything for Rize, that the dancers were the "special effects," as he claims in his director commentary, then what is one to do with the film's overt stylization?

In 2003 LaChapelle presented a short called Krump, what would eventually grow into the full-length feature, at the Sundance Film Festival. Wesley Morris captured LaChapelle describing the project as a movie "for the Xbox kid as well as people who go to films a lot. I wanted to make a piece of Pop Art, something for everybody." For LaChapelle, who got his start in the mid-1980s working for Andy Warhol at Interview magazine, Pop Art was an obvious way to reach out to more art-oriented audiences while staying true to fictive commercial worlds created within his photography. Rize, though steeped in reality and hardship, does not seem that far away from LaChapelle’s pop art origins. The consequence of this marriage is the sacrifice of krumping’s integrity for LaChapelle's art direction. Cultural Studies Professor Jacqueline Bobo, in a volume titled Black Popular Culture, warns audiences that representation is a politically charged act, "the way a group of people is represented can play a determining role in how those people are treated socially and politically." The question is then how does one separate LaChapelle's presentation of krump from the actual movement and its meaning? If they are one in the same, then "the process of criticism has ramifications as well.  In Black culture, [Stuart] Hall states, once a person enters the politics of criticism, that person leaves the age of critical innocence." It is no secret that once a work is produced its value and meaning change, dependant upon its reception from the contemporaneous audience.  Yet we must take the criticism of the film with a grain of salt, because not only are the reviews concerned with krump as a dance movement, it is possible they are more interested in David LaChapelle as director. The disconnect between LaChapelle's filmic motives and his lapse into presenting the dancers through his pop art eye allows critics to focus more on LaChapelle.  This takes the critical heat away from krumping itself, keeping the movement somewhat "critically innocent." It is not so much krump that is being questioned, it is LaChapelle's integrity as photographer turned documentary filmmaker. So, in this case, the politics of representation do not equal the politics of criticism, and we must not read the film in such a way. As Morris suggests, "the movie works so ferociously because LaChapelle refuses to be who he's not. He's a visualist, not a social anthropologist." So when Lil C dances on the beach at sunset, in an "hypnotic oceanside dance of anger, grief and bravado," we can forgive LaChapelle for suggesting a solo krump session at dusk, the grotesque and unfair world playing in the background, represented by the winking lights of a carnival on a distant pier.[1]  Lil C's movements are not manipulated, only the setting in which he dances is manufactured. While the beauty, allure, and injustice of the setting drives home the purpose of the dance, to move against oppression in an unjust world, it also reinforces LaChapelle's penchant to make pretty pictures.

LaChapelle's styling becomes highly problematic at the end of the film, where he deliberately styles the dancers and lets them rip in a music video type encore, described by the Village Voice as "a high-gloss slow-motion coda."  Like the "Mr. Olympia Finalists," LaChapelle chooses shots of the dancers with their faces only partially visible "showing their well-muscled, oiled torsos in writhing, sweating slow-motion glory."  Though LaChapelle may have wanted this scene to glorify the dancers, it really just "complicates the intentions of Rize by offering black bodies for the viewer's pleasurable and leisurely consumption" (Kim Hewitt, Journal of Popular Music Studies). Similarly, Bob Longino of the The Atlanta Journal – Constitution offers: "They gyrate, often in slow motion, against, say, the backdrop of a deep blue sky. It might as well be a single-frame image in Vogue or Vibe." Images of LaChapelle's fashion photography pop up in comparison to the final sequence, which in reality, seems like a flip book of LaChapelle's still shots.

Where LaChapelle's presentation may seem to take away from the integrity of the dancers, what it is doing simultaneously is putting emphasis on the body and its power to write, tell a story, transform and differentiate.  Washington Post critic Robin Givhan writes: "LaChapelle's film style--like his fashion photography--employs blindingly saturated colors. His sky is lapis. His dancers are a lush, glossy chocolate. The sweat on their limbs doesn't just glisten, it flashes white hot. LaChapelle transforms the dancers into a study of human musculature. With every roll of the body or snap of the chest, one can see the muscles engage and react." Though David LaChapelle's enhancement of the dancers and krump may disrupt the integrity of the film, it is undeniable that on its own, krumping is an aesthetically fascinating phenomenon. It rivets the viewer and provokes some sort of emotion--be it the desire to move, to fight, to yell or scream, this dance is doing something. More important, the film allows the dancers to both perform and speak about krump, uniting what is so often questioned in both cultural and dance study, the ability to put into words what one is feeling while dancing and what that movement means. Miss Prissy, the movie's heroine, articulates the point so well: "This is our reality.  I mean, look at the pressure we put on our bodies while we're doing it.  Some people can go into shock dancing like this.  And we take that risk because this is the way we get this anger out.  This is the way we express ourselves.  This is the way we spread the message." In essence, the reality Ms. Prissy is describing is a corpo-reality.  As Andrew Ward suggests, dancing for these kids "affords a sense of personal power, energy and control through bodily movement…which can provide some kind of displaced resolution to the powerlessness of the dole." In a review of the film for Dance Magazine, Taisha Paggett suggests, "If movement were words, this would be a poetry slam." There is no denying that the bodies in Rize are talking.  LaChapelle's styling is certainly worth critique, however it should not stop anyone from seeing the film and appreciating its cultural importance. Despite the copious amounts of water and oil he uses to enhance the aesthetics of the dancers' bodies, Rize has given mainstream society an opportunity to look at and listen to krump dancers, to understand their struggles and appreciate the art they are producing.