With Luc Delahaye, seeing and hearing the world

Paris. The last monograph by Luc Delahaye (born in 1962) in an institution dates back to 2005-2006, at La Maison rouge in Paris. But the Nathalie Obadia gallery regularly presents the photographer’s creations, and his works are often shown in France and abroad in exhibitions relating to the war. The Red House exhibition, made up of seventeen large format panoramic photographs taken between 2001 and 2004 on the war in Afghanistan and Iraq or the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, had left its mark, sparked debate and aroused the interest of collectors like Claude Berri. She had also inducted into the contemporary art world a major, multi-awarded reporter, former member of Sipa Press and Magnum Photos, who had broken away from the press some time earlier. However, he was not the first to declare himself an artist after journalistic activity, nor to produce large photographic paintings. In terms of the representation of war, Sophie Ristelhueber and Gilles Peress were the leaders of this movement initiated since the 1980s in France.

Photos sometimes staged

Twenty years later, the Jeu de Paume exhibition is just as striking with its view of war, reality and its states of violence, resistance and resilience. The period covered, from 2001 to 2025, includes works already exhibited and others produced since using various techniques, i.e. around forty in total out of the 74 selected by the photographer for the catalog raisonné published as part of the exhibition. Afghanistan, Iraq, Rwanda, Haiti, West Bank, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Calais, Ukraine but also the trial of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague or the trading room of the London Metal Exchange: the photos from these series are sometimes constructed from a photomontage of shots taken on site, other times staged and assembled by computer. But all of them attract attention for their allegorical dimension and their autonomous character.

An atlas of images

If the photographic painting remains the preferred form, two pieces produced with the support of Jeu de Paume explore new narrative forms. You have to take the time to look at them, at least for the atlas of images formed by What’s Going Onwhose title is borrowed from the song by Marvin Gaye and which has a very personal register. This association of 693 black and white prints, reproductions of details of photographs linked to international news or to works of art and published by various titles of the Anglo-Saxon or French press between 2006 and 2012, reflects “obsessions, things that I love, that I hate, that make me sad”, explains the artist.

For the second, a color video entitled Syria Report, the viewer will have difficulty sustaining his attention during its duration of 25 minutes, due to the violence of certain images extracted from videos made by Syrians and published on the Internet in 2011-2012 to document the crimes of the regime perpetrated against the population.

The only regret: the absence of the first period relating to photojournalism, at the risk of maintaining the misunderstanding, still perceptible in the profession, of a photographer who turns his back on his origins. However, it would have been interesting, for an audience not necessarily familiar with the work, to recontextualize these years 2001-2025 in his career. To understand the work in its continuity, we must refer to Luc Delahaye’s interview with the critic and historian Michael Fried as well as to the text by Quentin Bajac, published in the catalog raisonné. Short biographies, room texts and labels developed for each work nevertheless provide the benchmarks and information necessary to understand the approach of a photographer in search of the appropriate form to give to the concrete dimension of war and for whom “the look is an act”.