Jesus is My Homeboy” is way more than just an image.It is an epiphany. A revelation. It was not developed by a big fashion entity focused solely on making money. It was not created to cash in on a trend. “Jesus is My Homeboy” was born from a challenge that led to salvation; an inspiration fueled by a real life situation. Here, the Virgin Mary holds the baby Jesus, sitting on the sand, surrounded by symbolism. In lieu of an ox, which represented patience in the Old Testament, LaChapelle features a man in an ox mask, nodding to the use of masks in religious and cultural ceremonies around the world. A bird replaces the traditional depiction of an angel on the scene, representing fertility, freedom, and the human soul. A leopard, considered to be the animal of a ruler, is represented, too, in the man drumming over the newborn, painted in spots. A few years later an aspiring fashion designer was poking through a second hand shop, looking for gems, when he came across a silk screen that he was very taken with. He began to produce and sell t-shirts featuring the image on the silk screen, and was very successful. The shirts became an international phenomenon, appearing on consumers from all walks of life. One day Van Zan opened a tattered copy of People magazine he found while waiting in line at the DMV, and he saw it. He saw his shirt.A grinning celebrity held out his chest proudly and pointed with both index fingers at the words, “Jesus is My Homeboy”. Then he saw his shirt on TV. Then, on the streets. Then he knew his message was being heard, and he was overjoyed. By purchasing the original prints and other products, you are helpingVan Zan to keep the “Jesus Is My Homeboy” Movement alive.

He stood down, and one by one the rest of the crowd stood down as well until Van Zan understood that if he stood up and walked away, he would not be beaten down again. I felt real bad after it happened — what I was forced to do. But after I talked to those detectives, I thought, Wow, was I put there for a purpose? Eventually, she told me to give her a call after she got out of work. She worked at some hospital where the shifts were from 2 in the afternoon until 10 at night. She said, “Come on by. I’m gonna take my bath, and by the time I get outta my bath, you should be here.” I was like, “booty call,” you know?

Cite This Work

The apostles were not the aristocracy, they were not the well-to-do, they weren’t the popular people; they were sort of the dreamers and the misfits,” LaChapelle said in a 2008 interview for The Art Newspaper TV. If Jesus were here today, he said, he would be hanging out with the street people and the marginalized: the poor, the homeless, prostitutes, drug dealers, gangsters, and so on. And more than that, these people would have been his closest and most faithful band of followers. David LaChapelle was born in Connecticut in 1963 and attended high school at North Carolina School of The Arts. Originally enrolled as a painter, David began to experiment in the medium of photography developing an analogue technique of hand-painting his own negatives to achieve a sublime spectrum of color before processing his film. He got with another friend of his, named Chris, and they started working together making new shirts. Chris was dating a woman who was a wardrobe stylist for movies at the time, so I think she maybe gave the Jesus Is My Homeboy shirt to some people. In 1992, the streets of LA were flooded with angry looters furious at the treatment of Rodney King, a victim of police brutality. They broke windows, stole from shops, and brutalized anyone who got in their way. The only printed silk screen for the “Jesus is My Homeboy” T-shirt was at the printers, and it vanished in the path of destruction left by the looters.It was seemingly gone forever, so Van Zan got on with his life, accepting his misfortune as simply the end of an era. All good things must come to an end, he thought.

Someone wrote a comment online when I moved to Maui, like: ‘The person who gave us Paris Hilton and destroyed our culture is now gonna go live in the jungle.’ Did I really bring culture down?!” Well, didn’t he fetishise some of the dumber aspects of it?

jesusismyhomeboy worn by icon #pamelaanderson , just because your a celebrity doesn't mean you dont have good taste. After that near-death experience, Frater designed the now-iconic “Jesus is my Homeboy” image. The man with the upturned palms and the gentle face is a Jesus without race or creed, he said. He’s a person you can count on to stand with you, no matter the situation. Frater had the image printed onto T-shirts, which he sold in a local park. It even became the official image of the peace conferences held for gangs in the late 1980s. Here, Jesus is portrayed as remarkably traditional and conspicuously white, draped in red and blue robes, echoing Leonard da Vinci's enduring mural from the 1490s, while the apostles in LaChapelle's version are of different races. Judging by their dress code, they are influenced by urban hip-hop culture.

Don’t judge other people, and God will not judge you. If you judge other people, you will be judged in the same way you judge them”.I was freaked out. All I could see was blood forming underneath his head on the concrete. I immediately left the scene, aware that my out-of-state plates that read “VAN ZAN” were an easy tell if anyone had seen what had happened. I remembered when I was a boy, me and my brothers and a couple of my friends in Texas would go hunting with our fathers. They’d build a fire, and we’d sit around and the old men would tell stories. Around one of those campfires, my dad once told me, “Never let a man tie you up, ‘cause he can do anything to you once he ties you up. And if he got a gun on you, make him kill you before he ties you up.” At age 17, LaChapelle moved to New York City. Following his first photography show at Gallery 303, he was hired by Andy Warhol to work at Interview Magazine. For an artist who regularly turns convention upside down, I find it interesting that LaChapelle chose to represent Jesus in such a traditional way—open-armed, stoic, and glowing like a nightlight (and unmistakably white). The choice was intentional, no doubt; I’m just trying to figure out what purpose it serves, because I feel that that sort of Jesus doesn’t fit comfortably into a modern-day context—he’s too rigid and inapproachable. In the photos, Jesus isn’t really hanging with his boys (or with his homegirl, Mary M.). Instead, it looks as if he dropped in from another planet. Any thoughts? Van Zan Frater was a young Texan, recently relocated to Los Angeles. It was the 1980s, a time of great financial opportunity, and he was ready to make his place in the world. He was becoming familiar with the area, but didn’t know it well yet, so he pulled into the stark, unadorned parking lot of a run-down looking liquor store in South Central LA to use a pay phone. His guard was down when it should have been up. Way up.