Luc Delahaye

Born in 1962, Luc Delahaye was a leading war photojournalist in the 1990s, and for a time was a member of the Magnum agency. He belongs to a generation of photographers who have reworked the relationship between documentary practices and the artistic dimension.

After distributing his images mainly through the press and artist's book, from the 2000s onwards he turned to large format photography and the gallery wall, while maintaining the documentary anchoring of his images and continuing to deal with subjects linked to topical issues.

For more than twenty years, his photographs, usually large-scale and in colour, have dealt with a certain chaos in the contemporary world: from the war in Iraq to that in Ukraine, from Haiti to Libya, from OPEC conferences to those of the COP, Delahaye draws a parallel between the noise of the world and the calm of the bodies that are supposed to regulate it.

Sometimes made in a single instantaneous shot, sometimes veritable compositions assembled by computer over a period of months, from dozens of fragments of images, Luc Delahaye's photographs are always encounters, whether immediate or delayed, with a reality. A reality that he aims to show, in a form of documentary withdrawal, without demonstrating: ‘To arrive, through a form of absence, through a form of unconsciousness perhaps, at a unity with reality. A silent unity. Photography is a beautiful thing: it allows us to reunite with the world.

The exhibition dedicated to Luc Delahaye is the first retrospective devoted to him in Paris since 2006 - the year he exhibited at the Maison Rouge. It includes some forty of his large-format works, a video, and a number of documentary installations created especially for the occasion.

Curated by Quentin Bajac