Recent History: Photographs by Luc Delahaye
© Luc Delahaye, Hotel Palestine, home of the international media in Baghdad, Iraq, 2003
The majority of photojournalists tell themselves they do this work because it is important, that if people can just see these problems in these parts of the world they will do something about them. I have never believed this. I even think that that is a con. You ask yourself if you have the right to be in such a crisis area. Is it legitimate to bend over someone who is about to die? Is it correct to photograph a dying woman?. . . I restore (the suffering) more effectively if I am able to adopt a certain detachment.
from The Real Thing: Photographer Luc Delahaye by Bill Sullivan for an artnet Magazine feature on artnet.com
Since the 1990′s, Luc Delahaye has photographed major conflicts all around the world, including Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Under contract for Newsweek magazine and a member of Magnum Photos, Delahaye’s work in photojournalism has been recognized with such awards as the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal in 1993 and 2002, the ICP Infinity Award in 2001 as well as first prize for the World Press Photo in 1993, 1994 and 2002.
Ten years ago, when I was still a photojournalist, I was beginning to confront the limitations of journalism. I asked extremely simple questions: what is a camera exactly? What happens when the shutter fires?
from The Big Picture by Peter Lennon for The Guardian
© Luc Delahaye,
In 2004, Delahaye resigned from Magnum Photos, no longer considering himself a photojournalist, but rather an artist. Unlike the photo-journalistic practice in using small-format cameras (35mm and digital), Delahaye has been utilizing medium- and large-format cameras, including a Linhof Technorama 612 panoramic camera, and enlarging the resulting images from these conflict areas to near-life size scale, approximately 4 feet by 8 feet, for a heightened sense of photographic description and reality.
Recent History: Photographs by Luc Delahaye features a series of these photographs on exhibit at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. The exhibition is on view through November 25.
The large-scale photographs take these moments of crisis and experience to a contemplative context, far from the usual recorded observation found on television or in a magazine. Not only is the scale of these moments arresting, but the moments captured themselves. Delahaye arrives after the traveling media caravan has swept in, reported the story and left. These photographs capture the residual effects and aftermath of these horrific experiences of conflict, such as people displaced by war in Chad or the death of a Taliban soldier in Afghanistan, suggesting narrative tableauxs that function between a reality of what has been revealed by traditional documentary photographic practice and a dramatic fiction as referenced in history paintings.
The sense of vast visual space and compositional structure in each photograph draws attention to poignant details vital to the interpretative possibilities and photographic meaning, requiring the viewer to experience the photograph from a distance. Upon closer examination with some of the photographs, such as Hotel Palestine, Baghdad, Iraq, 2003, some of these same details lose their sense of importance as they are distorted and soft in sharpness along the image edges due to how the extreme wide angle of the cameras’ lens records the scene in combination with the large-scale printing. Each of these photographs embraces the viewer to bear witness to the events unfolding in front of them, providing an immediate physical presence and opportunity of attentive contemplation to the current social landscape of conflict that cannot be comprehended in a thirty-second video clip on television.
© Luc Delahaye, Dead Taliban fighter, Afghanistan, 2001
Additional discussion on Luc Delahaye, his working process as an artist within the context of art and documentary photography can be found here:
A Conversation with Luc Delahaye by Jörg M Colberg, who writes about photography on his blog, Conscientious, as well as for American Photo
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