PARIS.- Jeu de Paume will dedicate a major monographic exhibition to Luc Delahaye (b. in Tours in 1962), presenting his photographic work between 2001 and 2025. This decisive period in his career coincides with his increasing distance from photojournalism and his commitment to the field of art.
A prominent war photojournalist in the 1990s and a former member of the Magnum agency, he is part of a generation of photographers who re-examined the articulation between documentary practices and an artistic dimension.
For twenty-five years, his photographs, most often in large format and in colour, have offered a glimpse of the ills of the contemporary world. From the Iraq War to the Ukraine War, from Haiti to Libya, from the OPEC conferences to the COP, Delahaye explores the echo of the world and the institutions supposed to regulate it.
Sometimes produced in a single shot, other times veritable compositions assembled by computer over a period of months from fragments of images, Luc Delahaye’s photographs are always an encounter, whether immediate or deferred, with reality. A reality that is expressed, through a form of documentary withdrawal, without demonstration:
“To arrive via a form of absence, a form of unconsciousness perhaps, at a unity with reality. A silent unity. The practice of photography is a rather beautiful thing: it enables the reunification of the self with the world.”
This exhibition, the first devoted to the photographer in Paris since 2005, offers a retrospective look at twenty-five years of creation. It brings together some forty large-format works, some of which have never been seen before or were created especially for the occasion, as for example, the video about the Syrian conflict, which Delahaye has been working on for many years, as well as a large installation in a novel format for the artist. The exhibition also provides the opportunity for visitors to discover Luc Delahaye’s creative process, through his visual sources and the images he discards.
From the late 1990s onwards, Luc Delahaye diversified the means of disseminating his images beyond the press, notably publishing several author’s books. Portraits/1 (1996) – a series of portraits of homeless people taken in photo booths, Mémo (1997) – a collection of portraits of the Bosnian victims of the war taken from the obituary pages of a Sarajevo newspaper, and L’Autre (1999) – a series of portraits of passengers in the Parisian métro, taken without their knowledge by the photographer and avoiding all eye contact with his subjects. All testify to a desire to erase the operator, to depersonalize the gaze. These strategies of avoidance prefigure a body of work, which after 2001, would continue to explore this unique relationship to reality. Between 2001 and 2005, Luc Delahaye used a panoramic camera, producing images with large dimensions and elongated proportions. This format allows for a broadening of the vision, a distancing of the subject, and an open reading. The operator seems almost absent and the viewer is never in the image but facing it. For Delahaye, the panorama becomes a means of constructing a space of observation devoid of affect, conducive to an expanded vision of human situations, whether a refugee camp, a UN meeting, or a funeral ceremony in Rwanda.
From 2005 onwards, panoramic photography gave way to other modalities: digital compositions based on multiple staged shots. Delahaye sought to capture the complexity of a situation in a single image, while maintaining a fundamental ambiguity, and repudiating any explicit interpretation. This evolution was accompanied by a wider variety of formats, affirming the presence of the human figure. Detail became essential and served to anchor the image in reality.
Over time, Delahaye began to travel less, and for shorter periods; the computer became his primary tool, and his practice more akin to writing. The studio, a place of solitude and composition, became the laboratory for developing an essentially thought-out image. The process of transforming reality became more complex and lengthier. Nevertheless, the moment the shot is taken remains central, with the works always dated the day of the initial shoot. A telling example of this logic may be seen with Soldats de l’Armée syrienne, Alep, novembre 2012 (Soldiers of the Syrian Army, Aleppo, November 2012). Although this complex composition is made from various shots over the duration of the Syrian conflict, the artist dated the work to 2012. It can be seen for the first time in this exhibition. This fidelity to the moment of origin reveals a certain tension between the photographer’s compositional work and its presence in reality.
The 2010s witnessed an evolution in the artist’s vocabulary, accompanied by new experiments: video, a return to black and white in an impersonal aesthetic, research in an attempt to go beyond the single image, through sequences, series, or polyptychs. His treatment of the human figure also altered: his silhouettes now became bodies, on the scale of the viewer. The individuals represented, often anonymous, acquired a universal value. Delahaye depicted people in situations of suffering: soldiers, prisoners, displaced persons, wandering children, vulnerable people, men and women absorbed in certain tasks. The image seeks less to narrate than to give a density to these taciturn presences.
His work in India (2013), Senegal (2019-2020), and the West Bank (2015-2017) constitute closed ensembles, on the margins of his oeuvre. They focus on a form of everyday life and gestures, underpinned by specific concerns: the planned disappearance of a village in India, manual work and the sacred in Senegal, ordinary life and forms of resistance in one of the Occupied Territories.
Today, Delahaye does not deny himself any of these avenues or methods—digital composition, staging, snapshots—even if staging and composition remain essential to creating images free from the author’s subjectivity and the contingency of reality alike. Through his work, the Jeu de Paume exhibition offers an overview of the state of the world in this first quarter of the twenty- first century. A tormented world, dominated by turmoil. A world where conflicts and wars, as well as their echoes within international institutions and bodies, play a prominent role. The exhibition is accompanied by a reference publication, in the form of a catalogue raisonné reproducing and cataloguing the selection of seventy- four works created by Luc Delahaye over the course of the past twenty-five years, and on display here.
