Over 100 exhibitions, from David LaChapelle to selfies, train a lens on photography.

Fiona Sweet was in a bookshop flicking through one of David LaChapelle’s photography books when it struck her that she wasn’t aware of his work ever having been shown in Australia.

As the new Artistic Director of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, she was looking for a headline event, so she did some quick research and discovered that her hunch was right. The acclaimed American commercial photographer, fine-art photographer, music video director and film director hadn’t had a solo exhibition here.

“That was it really,” says Sweet. “I knew that it would be attractive to arts and photography lovers, and that others who might not go to art exhibitions would be interested, so it ticked all the boxes really.”

LaChapelle is known for his striking, irreverent, slickly staged images, which use a hyper-realistic aesthetic to comment on themes like consumerism, pop culture and celebrity. Andy Warhol gave him his first big break in the 1980s with a job as a commercial photographer for Interview magazine. Since then, his images have graced the covers of magazines such as Italian Vogue, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone.

Over the years, he has...