David LaChapelle. Good News

There is an image in Good News of bodies suspended in bright water, eyes closed, lit as though the glow were rising out of them instead of settling on their skin. Nobody is drowning. Everyone looks saved. That single frame carries the entire ambition of this volume, which is to photograph transcendence with the exact production values David LaChapelle once aimed at pop stars and soda campaigns.

For most of the 1990s he was among the most in-demand commercial photographers alive, the name art directors reached for when they wanted a celebrity turned into a saturated, surreal spectacle. Then he stopped, moved to a farm in Hawaii, and came back with a two-part statement about the end of the world and whatever might follow it. This is the second half. Its companion, Lost + Found, stages the catastrophe. Good News stages the arrival.

The method never softens to suit the new subject. These are constructed images in the oldest sense of the word: elaborate sets, practical lighting, large crews, compositions lifted straight out of Renaissance and Baroque painting and restaged with living bodies. A resurrection gets blocked and lit with the same rigor a beverage advertisement would demand. A working photographer feels that difference immediately. Nothing here is a lucky grab through a long lens. Every frame was engineered, budgeted, and built from the floor up.

There is a real lesson buried in the spectacle for anyone who assembles images for a living. He works the way a film director works, not the way a street photographer does. He storyboards, scouts, casts, constructs, and lights toward a picture that already exists in his head before a single frame is shot. The image is a destination, and the whole apparatus of production is just the road out to it. Most commercial shoots are timid versions of the same idea, and the timidity is usually what makes them forgettable. Seeing that logic pushed this far is clarifying precisely because it strips away every excuse; the only question left is whether the picture in his head was worth all the machinery.

Color does the theological heavy lifting. LaChapelle pushes saturation well past naturalism until skin, water, and sky all seem lit from within, and that unnatural intensity is itself the argument, showing the world not as it stands but as a believer insists it could be. The palette that once sold excess now sells rapture. It is the identical tool. Only the target has moved. That single continuity, from selling a soft drink to selling the afterlife, is the most revealing thing about the whole enterprise.

The imagery reaches for the largest possible themes without apology. Deluge and rescue, paradise regained, figures rising toward the light, crowds gathered into tableaux that quote scripture and altarpieces in the same breath. Ordinary settings keep turning sacred; a car wash becomes a baptism, a gas station becomes a shrine, everyday American surfaces pressed into the service of redemption. It is enormously ambitious, and the ambition is exactly what makes the failures as visible as the triumphs. A quieter photographer could hide a weak idea behind good taste; this approach has nowhere to hide, and it does not try.

That relentlessness is also the risk. Point a glossy, hyper-saturated visual language at salvation and you flirt constantly with kitsch, and a few of these pictures do tumble over the edge, turning paradise into something lit like a resort brochure with God on the invoice. The sincerity is total, which is precisely why the strongest frames land with real force and why the weakest ones feel airless and stalled. He believes every word of it. When the belief and the craft lock together the effect is genuinely moving; when the belief gets out ahead of the craft, the image merely glistens.

Go back to those figures floating in the luminous water. Nothing about the picture is subtle, and it has no interest in being; it wants to overwhelm you into feeling something, the way the ceiling of a cathedral does. Whether that works on you is the thing to test directly. Set this volume open beside its darker twin, put the flood and the rescue on facing tables, and decide for yourself whether the pairing earns its enormous conviction or only performs it.