He did not have H.I.V., as he learned when he finally was tested. (“It’s the luck of the draw, really,” he said. “I was 15 back then and in New York and having sex.”) 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 blew into town.

In New York briefly, on a rare trip away from the farm he has carved out for himself on the dozen or so acres of a defunct nudist colony he bought in a remote corner of Maui, Mr. LaChapelle was overseeing a one-man show at a Madison Avenue gallery and a separate commissioned installation that opens in the lobby of the Lever House on Park Avenue on Thursday.

With their erotic gloss, their overheated aesthetics and their slick production values, the photographs at Michelman Fine Art are recognizably the work of a man who in his editorial work for Vanity Fair, Interview, Rolling Stone and others depicted David Duchovny dressed in Lycra bondage trousers, Kanye West as Black Jesus, a turbaned Elizabeth Taylor looking like a $5 fortune teller, Eminem naked but for a well-placed prop and other stars like Tupac Shakur (wearing soap bubbles), Angelina Jolie and Lady Gaga baring their souls for the camera, along with a good deal else.

At the Lever House, however, the artist has returned to techniques he employed when, at the start of his career — long before he became the go-to video director for pop music divas like Christina Aguilera — he used naïve, childlike forms like linked paper chains to make his work.