Excerpt from essay The Rise of Photography by Jan Mulder, President – Center for the Image

When we first contacted the artist about the exhibition we present to you today at the MAC, we discovered that his work is nourished just as much by his relationships with magazines—where fashion and our contemporary cultural icons act as his raw materials—as by the creative practice of an artist who captures his own vision of the world in his images, only fitting for a member of the generation of young artists who built on the foundations laid by Andy Warhol. LaChapelle's works are inhabited by the sex symbols of the Hollywood star system and the consumer goods of a global society, as well as religious references and nods to art history. In his photographs, the body's beauty cannot free itself from its status as a consumer good, although it never fully renounces the transcendence of the spiritual, in the same way that the refineries or gas stations he invents are as much ambiguous symbols if the industrial revolution's triumph as they are the destruction of the environment.