We reach David LaChapelle at his lodgings near the Red Sea in the early evening last week. He’s there for work, but stole away to swim in the sea and take in the splendor of the coral reef. “It was incredible,” he says, quietly awestruck.
Despite taking our call at the end of a long day, he looks particularly fresh-faced and his mind is nimble, unspooling the history and concepts behind a decades-long body of work with total recall. He seems ageless.
Which all makes it surreal that this spry booked-and-busy artist is traveling to Orlando next week to be on hand for the opening of a new retrospective exhibition, As the World Turns, that spans the entirety of a career that started in the 1980s shooting for Andy Warhol’s seminal Interview magazine. LaChapelle, however, is unfazed about getting the retrospective treatment.
“I’ve been taking pictures for so long. I started when I was 19. So I spent over 43 years, yeah, so it feels like the right time to do it,” he says. “Even though we’re still doing work. I’d like to think of it as a mid-career kind of thing.”
David LaChapelle: As the World Turns — opening Saturday — will reportedly be the largest U.S. museum retrospective of his works to date, presenting more than 100 pieces of art.
The work featured in As the World includes well-known and fantastical portraits of the likes of Amy Winehouse, David Bowie, Madonna, Muhammad Ali, Charli XCX, Tupac Shakur and Doja Cat, as well as fashion editorials, early religious-themed works and some new, previously unseen pieces.
LaChapelle has characterized it as almost a group exhibition, because it follows so many distinct chapters of his long career. So many David LaChapelles, if you will.
“There’s so many different themes and things I’ve explored, from the very escapist and absurdist, surreal — I call it the shallow end of the pool — the more fashion-oriented stuff, or the portraits of pop stars. And then you have the deeper work that deals with my friends dying of AIDS, social issues, climate change, the flood of the future,” he says. “There are so many different things that I’m obsessed with. And the way I get that obsession out is to just make a photograph of it, to create art out of it and then I can sleep better at night once I’ve exorcised it out of my system.”
Religion is a theme that continually resurfaces in LaChapelle’s work, both new and old — the exorcism won’t take, it would seem. We ask him about formative portraits from the 1980s of friends and lovers dying of AIDS, taken right at the beginning of the AIDS crisis. This was arguably the start of an activist streak running throughout LaChapelle’s work, also taking in the “kissing sailors” shot taken during the World War II peace celebration in 1995, to the “House at the End of the World” and “After the Deluge” photos both from the early 2000s that vividly address climate change.
“I was in New York City in the East Village. It was the best of times and worst of times, being 15 years old and living in the East Village, it was like a utopia. And then by the time I was 19, my first boyfriend had died, and I thought for 20 years that I was [HIV] positive. I just wouldn’t even go to a doctor, because I assumed that I would be …” — he trails off momentarily — “I didn’t feel like I had much time. So there was an urgency to my work. I wanted to leave something behind. Seeing a lot of my friends die like that, so young in their early 20s, really made me question ideas of life after death. These pictures are my response to that. These were my answers.”
Most attendees will be drawn to OMA to see LaChapelle’s vivid, hyper-real celebrity and fashion work. These are images that have both traced the arc of popular culture and simultaneously shook it up with playful subversion. Among these photos is an iconic portrait of rapper Tupac Shakur in a bathtub — “‘coming clean’ just after he got out of prison,” per LaChapelle — from 1996.
“He was an artist, and I think he was really set on being an actor. He was very humble and very, very smart and sensitive. I told him my ideas for the shoot, and he didn’t have to look to his left or right to ask his publicist or agent if it was OK,” LaChapelle remembers.
This show is not all looking back. As the World also features new works, including — a continuation of his obsession with religious iconography — a massive fresco-inspired piece that will take up an appreciable chunk of the museum.
“It’s inspired by the depiction of the Second Coming by Michelangelo; that fresco in the Sistine Chapel was just a subject that I’m interested in and wanted to use that as a starting point. For years, I didn’t know that Christ was the center of it. I thought it was an angel, because I’ve never seen Christ depicted muscular and healthy without a beard,” ponders LaChapelle. “It’s an overwhelming piece that has hundreds of figures in it. I wanted to do a tribute to it, a modern exploration of it.”
We have to ask the globe-trotting LaChapelle if he has any personal experiences in Orlando. And he gives an answer that is both very David LaChapelle and, improbably, takes us back to where we began: the beauty of nature.
“Back in the ’80s, my friend’s family lived down there, and she invited me to go down there for a few weeks. She worked at CBGBs. We went down to visit her family, and every day she’s like, ‘Do you want to go to Disney World?’ But I just wanted to go to Wekiwa Springs State Park.
“I was shooting photos, and I didn’t know about the alligators. I was having my friend get out of the boat and pose. It was great! I’m looking forward to doing that again.”
The weekend will be a busy one for LaChapelle — he’ll be at the media preview and the premiere party on Friday and then giving a lecture (free with RSVP) with a book-signing at the museum on Saturday — but we have high hopes he’ll be able to squeeze in another Wekiwa visit before the world turns again.
Opens noon Saturday, Jan. 31, Orlando Museum of Art, 2416 N. Mills Ave., omart.org, $20.
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This article appears in Jan. 28-Feb. 3, 2026.