Why David LaChapelle's crazy-complicated photos are the ideal antidote to Instagram

If there's one style dominating photography right now, it's the stripped-back look: clean shots, natural light, real moments. David LaChapelle is the complete opposite. And his biggest US museum show, opening at the Orlando Museum of Art this week, might be exactly what we need to see right now.

While everyone else chases candid moments, LaChapelle builds entire worlds. His photos aren't captured spontaneously; they're constructed over days with massive physical sets, teams of people and a weird technique he invented as a teenager: literally painting on his negatives before developing the film.

This method came from his background as a painting student at North Carolina School of the Arts. When he couldn't get the intense colors he wanted in the darkroom, he just grabbed a brush and painted straight onto the negatives. It's like building a skyscraper when everyone else is putting up tents.

Making things matters

At 17, after his first gallery show in New York, Andy Warhol hired LaChapelle to shoot for Interview Magazine. By 1997, The New York Times was saying that he'd influence the next generation of photographers the way Richard Avedon had.

But LaChapelle's real impact goes beyond his look. At a time when photography increasingly means pointing your phone and letting software do the rest, his work is all about actually making things.

Titled As the World Turns, the Orlando show includes behind-the-scenes footage showing what goes into each shot: sketches, models built from junk food containers, days building sets that only exist for one shot. It's photography as Hollywood production.

The show features over 100 works from four decades, from early celebrity shots of Tupac Shakur and David Bowie to religious scenes that remake Renaissance paintings with modern pop culture. There's even a brand new large-scale piece inspired by old fresco techniques; because apparently regular photography wasn't ambitious enough.

Where most photography tries to look natural – the "I just woke up like this" vibe – LaChapelle celebrates the artificiality. His images are obviously staged, obviously painted, obviously unreal. And somehow, by going to that extreme, they reveal truths about celebrity worship, consumerism, religion and environmental disaster that more "authentic" approaches miss.

Take his celebrity portraits. Most portrait photographers try to uncover the "real" person behind the fame. In contrast, LaChapelle photographs the fame itself; turning his subjects into modern-day saints or consumer products. It's both celebrating and mocking celebrity culture at the same time, using advertising's own tricks against it.

This approach, as you might expect, requires massive teams. Unlike the lone photographer wandering streets with a camera, LaChapelle works with set builders, lighting crews and digital artists.

His photos are closer to movie productions than traditional photography; which makes sense since he's also directed music videos for Britney Spears, Elton John and others, along with the documentary Rize, about LA street dance.

More is more

For those used to Instagram's minimal aesthetic, this more-is-more approach is a useful reminder: there's not just one way to make good photos. Sometimes going big actually works better than going small.

With AI threatening to turn photography into something that algorithms generate, LaChapelle's insistence on physically building everything feels almost rebellious. These are images that required someone to actually construct something, paint something, light something and photograph something that really existed.

Whether this hands-on approach is photography's future or its past is anyone's guess. But for anyone sick of the tyranny of minimal aesthetics and "real-life" moments, As The World Turns shows that you're allowed to build big, exaggerate wildly, go completely over the top… and still make photos that matter.

David LaChapelle: As the World Turns is open now at Orlando Museum of Art, 2416 N Mills Ave, Orlando, FL 32803 and runs until May 03.

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