Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

David LaChapelle was born in Connecticut in 1963. After attending the North Carolina School of Arts, he moved to New York where he enrolled at both the Art Students League and the School of Visual Arts. Not yet out of high school, he was offered his first professional job by Andy Warhol to shoot for Interview Magazine.
Before long, he was shooting for top international publications and creating the most memorable advertising campaigns of his generation. His striking images have appeared on and between the covers of magazines such as Italian Vogue, French Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Rolling Stone and i-D. He has photographed personalities as diverse as Tupac Shakur, Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Madonna, Amanda Lepore, Eminem, Philip Johnson, Lance Armstrong, Pamela Anderson, Uma Thurman, Elizabeth Taylor, David Beckham, Paris Hilton, Jeff Koons, Leonardo DiCaprio, Hilary Clinton, Muhammad Ali and Britney Spears, to name just a few.
After establishing himself as a fixture in contemporary photography, LaChapelle expanded his work to include direction of music videos, live theatrical events, and documentary film. In 2004, his directing of It's My Life by No Doubt won the award for Best Pop Video at the MTV Music Video Awards and LaChapelle himself garnered the MPVA's Director of the Year award. In the same year, he made the short documentary Krumped, an award-winner at Sundance from which he developed RIZE, the feature film acquired for worldwide distribution by Lions Gate Films. The film was released in the US and internationally in the summer of 2005 to huge critical acclaim, and was chosen to open the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.

Recent years have brought LaChapelle back to where he started, with some of the world's most prestigious galleries and museums exhibiting his works. These shows presented his latest series of works, in which LaChapelle has broken out of the frame, presenting three-dimensional sculptural murals.

His ability to create scenes of extreme reality using rich and vibrant color makes his work instantly recognizable and often imitated. He continues to be inspired by everything from art history to street culture, creating both a record and mirror of all facets of popular culture today.

Through this time my objective was to document America’s obsessions and compulsions using publications as a means to reach the broadest possible audience. I was employing “pop” in the broadest sense of the word. I was photographing the most popular people in the world to the marginalized always attempting communicate to the public in an explicit and understandable way. The images were always meant to attract, not alienate. Inclusion has always been the goal when making these pictures, and continues on in the newest works that will be exhibited.

The difference between the works I did as a photographer for hire and the most recent is that I’m freed from the constraints of magazines. The work has not only been liberated from the limitations of glossy pages, but has also emerged from the white frame, engaging the viewer with the exploration of three-dimensional tableaux.

I feel that we are living in a very precarious time, with environmental devastation, economic instability, religious wars waged, and excessive consumption amidst extreme poverty. I have always used photography as a means to try to understand the world and the paradox that is my life.

There is the feeling that we are living at a precipice. My hope is that through the narratives told in my images, I will engage people and connect with them addressing the same ideas or questions that possibly challenge them.

My latest pictures are a reflection of my earliest pictures. I reintroduce my personal ideas of enlightenment, regaining paradise, and the notion of life after death.