“I was not nice to the people around me ... I was even worse to myself.”

He was hired by Andy Warhol. He fired Madonna. He photographed Pamela Anderson and also Hillary Clinton.

He earned millions and spent much of that on a self-financed film about an urban dance form . When “Rize” failed to find a large audience, and with David LaChapelle weary after 20 years of 14-hour days, he disappeared.

“It was 2006, and the money was rolling in and I thought I was going to die,” Mr. LaChapelle, the 48-yearold photographer, said last month. He was making a brief touchdown in Manhattan on the way to Hong Kong for an exhibition of his work. It was not just the pressure of a high-flying career or even a tendency to recreational excesses that spooked him, Mr. LaChapelle said. It was a long-held conviction that he had AIDS.

He did not have H.I.V., as he learned when he finally was tested. Both that reality and a desire to restore to memory a period in the early ‘80s before downtown life was tinctured by tragedy motivated him to return to the art he made when, as a high school dropout from suburban Connecticut, he first showed up in New York.

In the city on a rare trip away from his farm in Maui, Hawaii, Mr. LaChapelle was overseeing a show at Michelman Fine Art gallery on Madison Avenue and Lever House on Park Avenue.

With their erotic gloss and their overheated aesthetics , the photographs at the Madison Avenue gallery are recognizably the work of a man who, in the top magazines, depicted Kanye West as Black Jesus, Elizabeth Taylor looking like a $5 fortune teller, Eminem naked but for a well-placed prop.

At the Lever House installation, however, the artist has returned to the naive techniques he employed at the start of his career . Paper chains hang from walls and ceilings, which, on closer inspection, reveal images of naked bodies, an allegory for human connection, Mr. LaChapelle said.

His detractors maintain that Mr. LaChapelle is less an artist than a commercial photographer. Richard Marshall, the curator at Lever House, admitted to having “had the same prejudices,” before seeing the early proposals for the LaChapelle project. . Yet there are some who insist that it was precisely with the work-for-hire that Mr. LaChapelle achieved his real contribution.

“David exists in this new territory, in the collapse between vanguard and pop culture,” said Jeffrey Deitch, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Mr. LaChapelle was ignoring his career , the market for his images vaulted. But he did not care.

“ None of the money really matters to me,” he said .

He explained that during his busiest years, he lost himself. “I did not know how to say ‘no.’ I worked 14 months without taking a day of vacation. I was 30 pounds overweight and drinking so much. I was not nice to the people around me, and I was even worse to myself.”

Mr. LaChapelle’s drive and intensity on set and off have contributed to a reputation for nearly maniacal perfectionism.

But he found his limits. In the middle of a call from Madonna in which the singer harangued him about a video , Mr. LaChapelle suddenly took the mobile phone and snapped it shut.

“ It was a pivotal moment in my life, because it was the first time I said I don’t want to do this anymore,” he said.

It was liberating, he added, “to think that I didn’t have to work for pop stars or magazines anymore, and that I would never have to shoot the latest video by Britney Spears again.”


By GUY TREBAY