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BY KENDALL MORGAN - A twenty-first century study in surrealism, a world of eccentric beauty where celebs riff on their public personae: it can only be a photo by David LaChapelle. Ideas flow fast and furious from the mind of the photographer, yet it takes a behind-the-scenes genius to make his fantasy a reality. Witness the contribution of prop stylist/set designer Kristen Vallow. A long-term collaborator of Mr. LaChapelle's, it is Kristen's job to take the most over-the-top concept and turn it into a tangible backdrop.

"Generally we sit down and free associate about ideas," Kristen explains. "David generally comes up with an idea that he really wants to do. David has this amazing intuition about people. He's mainly concerned with coming up with a beautiful image and we map out the shots." Which, of course, is just the beginning.

In her seven years of working with the photographer, Kristen has done everything from toting a family of taxidermied zebras around Paris to overseeing the construction of a giant Venus flytrapha strange career for someone who studied architectural preservation at the University of Pennsylvania. "When I started doing this I had no idea that this was a job. I'd worked on a couple of low-budget films in the art department, but I had no idea people did this for still photography. I didn't know what a stylist was or anything."

Kristen says she was "on the lam" from graduate school when she came to New York and happened to be leafing through an issue of Details. What she saw "stopped me in my tracks. For the first time in my life I turned back to see who the photo was by and it was David LaChapelle."

As fate would have it, Kristen was assisting a stylist whom she had met on a film when the duo was hired by LaChappelle himself to style and create a set and props. "I was really excited," she recalls, "because his was the first name I knew. He had a little studio on St. Mark's Place that was more like an apartment. The minute I walked into the studio I was snooping around looking at some boxes of prints, and I was amazed at what I saw. I was really taken aback. I met David and we pretty much had an [instant] rapport."

That first job led to solo work with the photographer and Kristen soon found herself burning the midnight oil in her bathroom, injecting plastic tubes with colored paint for a fashion shoot eventually reproduced in LaChapelle Land, the photographer's first book. All in a day's work. This was followed by an assignment to illustrate an article on Tantric sex for Details, which Kristen says, "neither of us knew anything about. I was scouting hotel locations and at one point David said to me, ‘Do your postmodern fantasy.' I didn't know that I could have an assistant so I wallpapered [a] room myself. I bought this wild- looking wallpaper and the bed and the bedspread and did [the set] in this little room in our studio. I stayed up all night and fell asleep on the bed. I woke up in this room I realized was absolutely horrifying, and after that David asked me to work with him full time."

That, as the story goes, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Once a concept is decided on, Kristen draws the set, finds the furniture and props, and picks out wallpaper and molding. Even though those early do-it-yourself shoots have evolved and she now has teams of assistants on both coasts, she still prefers to do a lot of the work herself. "I'm pretty obsessive about the details of it and the look of it," she admits. "For me it's a good situation. The pictures are really set-intensive, and that's not the focus of a lot of other photography. At one point when I was working with David, I left to do a movie (the indie film All Over Me), and I remember feeling it was a little bit of a shock for me to be in a situation where the production designer wasn't front and center. If I were to do a film again it would have to be that kind of film where [the look] was the maker and meaning of the movie. I've become spoiled by David's sophistication and his genius, really, about pictures."

Lucky for her, Mr. LaChapelle's move into celluloid may become a reality sooner rather than later. The Moby "Natural Blues" video, with LaChapelle as director and Vallow as set producer, won the MTV European Video of the Year in 2000.

For the moment, the duo's main challenge is to remain "consistently original on a deadline," and, of course, sail above the inevitable imitators who try to copy the look that David LaChapelle and Kristen Vallow work so hard to create. "That bugged me when I first saw it. I was watching MTV in my hotel, which I rarely watch. This video came on and they had rebuilt one of our sets. I almost thought I was hallucinating," she recalls. But in the end, Kristen says, "I'm a little flattered. [The copies] don't bother me that much. I'm sort of happy people like the pictures and enjoy them and remember them."