Sam Rohn

Over the last twenty-five years, David LaChapelle has created some of the most dynamic, powerful, original, and imaginative images of celebrity portraiture and expressive scenes reflecting, exposing, and commenting on the “cult” of personality, perversity of popular culture, Hollywood stardom, and the tabloids of vanity and gluttony. More recently he has stretched the boundaries of photography by moving to more historic, visionary “scenes” and recreations of the human condition as in “Deluge” and “Awakenings” (inspired by the Book of Genesis’ account of the Great Flood), which tackled the subjects of the human family amidst catastrophe and loss in search of salvation and divinity.

LaChapelle’s new work, Auguries of Innocence at the  Tony Shafrazi Gallery breaks unprecedented ground by utilizing both industrial and advanced modes of fabrication and presentation, as in children’s “pop-ups,” and the more industrial “Point of Purchase” (P.O.P.) to create epic three-dimensional tableaus, which shift the focus of the photograph from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional, jumpstarting our active participation and experience in the dynamic collision of image and form, form and content.