Excerpt from the critical essay, "Still Life" by Eric Troncy:

All this information, which today seems to give active form to taste and reputation – and is not in fact new – extends in its own way the very 19th- century vision of the romantic tormented artist. It does indeed have an effect on the perception which we have of the work of this or that artist, and in the case of David LaChapelle, it has been very generous. Added to the statements of rejection are the observations of behaviour judged to be unacceptable reminding us, as an old French proverb sums it up nicely “If you want to justify killing your dog, say it has rabies.” The staging that David LaChapelle orchestrated better than anyone in the last two decades of the 20th century, their grandiloquence and their various excesses in staging their colours, possible interpretations, decor and their paradoxical references, served to reinforce the portrait of himself which the Still Life series seems to summarize today. It is an idea to be taken as it is: the Still Life series constitutes a quite shameless self-portrait of David LaChapelle. He is not seen there in any explicit manner, but all these faces of men and women which he previously photographed “for real” and which now appeal to him once more in the form of wax model fragments, narrate in a moribund fresco the story of his own relationship to photography. And in a manner more radical than anything he has ever done before, this series which is not an arrogant self-criticism but an almost romantic observation presents him to us, defenceless. Influences on David LaChapelle have been sought everywhere (“movies, amateur photography, art history and pornography”; “LaChapelle draws on an immense lexicon of art historical references, current events, and popular culture”; “LaChapelle’s work has been influenced by Salvador Dali, Jeff Koons, Michelangelo, Cindy Sherman, and Andy Warhol”). And it would be reassuring to find some, but the truth is more brutal than that: David LaChapelle is an artist.