David LaChapelle. Lost and Found. Good News. Art Edition

By 2017, David LaChapelle had spent more than a decade away from the industry that made his name. He had walked out of celebrity and advertising work in the mid-2000s, decamped to a farm in Hawaii, and gone quiet. Lost + Found and Good News, issued together, were the announcement that he had been anything but idle.

Open either volume and the scale hits first. A gas station erupts in a wall of flame against a tropical dusk; a modern Deluge sends beautiful, half-dressed bodies tumbling through floodwater in open homage to Michelangelo; a supermarket glows like a cathedral. The pictures are enormous in ambition and, often, in literal production.

It helps to remember what he left behind. The old work turned pop stars into candy-colored icons, glossy, funny, weightless. These volumes keep the technique and swap the subject, aiming the same apparatus at mortality and belief, which is a stranger and more serious use of it.

The pairing is deliberate. Lost + Found catalogs a world coming apart, consumption and catastrophe rendered in saturated color, while Good News turns toward transcendence, resurrection, an almost devotional light. Together they were pitched as a kind of final testament, and this Art Edition binds both halves with a signed, numbered print.

Restraint is not on the menu.

Whatever one makes of the theology, the craft is close to overwhelming. The staging is operatic and the lighting is sculpted to the last highlight, with color graded to a precision most photographers reserve for a single hero shot and he holds it across hundreds of frames. Every image is built, cast, lit, and composed like a Baroque altarpiece run through Kodak saturation. The technical control is total, and even a viewer allergic to the sensibility has to concede the level of execution. Nobody stumbles into pictures like these; they are engineered.

The sensibility is where opinion splits, and honestly should. Push symbolism this hard and it can curdle into literalism: the flood means judgment, the light means grace, the message underlined until subtlety suffocates. What reads to one viewer as visionary reads to another as luxury kitsch with a sermon attached. The line between the sublime and the overwrought runs straight through these volumes, and different people will draw it in different places.

The gesture divided people on arrival, and time has not settled the argument. Admirers read the turn toward the spiritual as a genuine deepening; detractors see a showman who found a grander backdrop for the same theatrics. Both readings are available in the same picture, which is part of what makes the work hard to dismiss and hard to fully embrace.

The practical takeaway survives even for a skeptic. Strip away the eschatology and you have a master class in production design: how to pre-visualize a set, how to marshal color as structure, how to make a photograph feel painted without losing the photographic. His maximalism is a catalog of what becomes possible when nothing is left to chance.

Picture the volumes open on a studio table the week before an ambitious shoot, the flood scene on one side and the burning gas station on the other. They will not tell you to shoot like this; almost nobody should. They will, however, quietly raise your sense of how far a single frame can be pushed before the budget runs out or the meaning does.