Gathered around a table, a group of political leaders and experts on global warming are locked in the final phase of crucial discussions involving the future of mankind; It's five in the morning and the negotiations have reached a deadlock. On the outskirts of a town in northern France, five young Africans huddle around a fire, the flames of which seem to be about to erupt into a mythological creature.
These two photographic tableaux, around which the exhibition is based, depict situations that never actually existed. They have been assembled by the photographer from fragments drawn from reality, or acted out by protagonists in their own "roles". Yet these imaginary representations are made from the very substance of reality; in each case an act of reportage was the initial circumstance.
Luc Delahaye's working process begins, in the temporality of the snapshot, with the production of documents that serve as the imprints from which, back in the studio, the work of the imagination replaces the experience of reality. Each composition takes on a narrative power that arises from this interweaving. The photographic tableau, the space of a contemplative experience, simultaneously establishes the conditions for critical reflection.
Other works presented in the exhibition do not however fit into this tableau / document dialectic. Such is the case with a polyptych of 45 small-format, black and white prints, which depict civilians fleeing from shelling in the early days of the war in Ukraine. The tightly framed faces express a spectrum of emotions from sorrow to fear. In line with his earlier work on portraiture, in which depersonalisation was part of the methodology, Luc Delahaye has extracted these faces from crowd shots, searching for them deep within the photo and enlarging them. It is this distanciation in the process that allows him to preserve, intact, the dramatic tension of the moment.
In their rigorous formal construction, Luc Delahaye's photographs incorporate these multiple shifts - of signs, time and meaning.
