Luc Delahaye

Biography

I have chosen to do my essay on Luc Delahaye. Luc Delahaye is a French photographer that focuses primarily on social issues, conflicts and world events. He is best renowned for his work beginning in the early 2000s. He is best known for his work having “disturbing and unreal” elements since a lot of his photography is controversial.

Luc Delahaye was born in 1962 in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France. Delahaye initially began as a photojournalist. He began his career in the mid – 1980s at the photo agency Sipa Press, dedicating himself to war reporting. He joined the Magnum Photos and Newsweek Magazine team before leaving Magnum in 2004. He reputed himself in countries such as; Rwanda, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and Lebanon during the 1980s and 1990s with his war photography. Speaking on war he said “"In Beirut I discovered the beauty of war, the beauty of something that is deeply disturbing, but also a visual beauty that can't be found anywhere else -- it is totally unique," (http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/sullivan/sullivan4-10-03.asp).

“Delahaye's merging of art and documentary takes the viewer a world away from the often graphic horrors of war reportage, with its commonplace, usually tightly cropped, images of conflict situations”. (The Guardian)

He has won a number of awards including the Robert Capa Gold Medal and the Oskar Barnack Award back in 2000 for his work on the Winterreise photographs.

Delahaye’s photography was best known for its candid, direct recording of events and often times combined a touchy connectivity to news which includes a mental division in questioning his own being in his photographs. His notable photo books; Potrait/1 and L’autre highlight these thoughts that were later portrayed in these books. For instance Portrait/1 depicts portraits of homeless people and L’autre (The Other) are a string of stolen portraits taken in the Paris Subway.  In his book Winterreise published in 2000, the economic depression in Russia was explored.

Delahaye adopted a new focus in his photography in 2001 using large and medium format cameras and focused mainly on war scenes and global events. Some of his photographs are computer edited and produced in large sizes before being shown in museums.

In an interview with Artnet magazine in 2003, Delahaye is quoted saying: "Photojournalism is neither photography nor journalism. It has its function but it's not where I see myself: the press is for me just a means for photographing, for material – not for telling the truth."

Delahaye later announced that he was an artist and no longer a photojournalist the following year.

His photgraphs explore the boundaries between reality and the imaginary. They document immediate history,and impulse thought, "upon the relationships among art, history and information". (http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/delahaye/).

Work

In Delahaye's work the pictures work in a way that the big picture answers less that the questions asked about the progressive blurred line between art and reportage, and the sense of detachment that characterises contemporary photography. They also "question the relationship between the documentary value of photography and the museum as its proper context".

The work that I am going to focus on are his books L’autre, and Winterreise.

Delahaye’s book L’autre was published in 1999 and consists of black and white portraits of 90 unaware, everyday Parisian metro passengers taken between 1995 and 1997 and are framed in disparity of others in terms of investigation. This book is a “revealing investigation into the meaning of the human image and the relationship between the photographer and his subject.” (http://uk.phaidon.com/store/photography/lautre-9780714838427/).

Delahaye says he stole the portraits in this book because under French law people are is the owners of his or her image. Despite this, he also says that “our image is nothing more than a worthless alias of ourselves and it is everywhere without us knowing it”. The book is accompanied by a text from cultural theorist and psychologist Jean Baudrillard, philosopher whos work on Postmodernism, Marxism and contemporary culture have been highly influential internationally.

It is also, “a unique comment on closeness, distance and personal space in the urban realm, reflected upon further in the text by major French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard” (http://uk.phaidon.com/store/photography/lautre-9780714838427/)

“If you've ever feigned sleep on the Tube to avoid eye contact with other passengers, you will identify with the subjects of L'Autre ... it's a compelling book: the text alone will keep you coming back to it, and the fact that the Metro travellers refuse to look at you just makes you want to stare at them even more.” (Scene)

Delahaye’s use of  black and white full bleed shots portray the interior bleakness of everyday life distracted, preoccupied, people staring inwardly, anxious, faces that Baudrillard describes as "absent from their lives, raised to the tragic impersonal figuration of their destiny". An almost mute drama.

I thought the photographs in this book are both mysterious intriguing. It is obvious that Baudrillard belongs in this book in here in some sort of way, but his writing tends to demystify the mechanisms at work in Delahaye's work and moulds and forms the viewer’s opinion on how we see these photographs. I think that the images in the book needed to remain mysterious as Delahaye’s subjects.

Luc Delahaye’s book Winteresse is his road story as he travelled across the dark landscape of Russia in winter, being the melancholy storyteller that he is. In this book he takes an intimate look into Russia's private face of moral and social crisis. This book is basically the bridge between art and journalism. According to amazon the book is described as, “poetic - simultaneously terrifying, exciting, intimate, moving and very revealing”.  As they offer pleasures even through the depressing content of a nation falling to pieces, in winter, through alcohol and drug abuse. I thought the book’s attempt in making social and political statements about the sufferings he witnessed the Russians enduring during the industrialization following the Iron curtain fall. I think he succeeds in documenting in painful detail how people managed under the capitalist regime. 

Despite the truth of Delahaye’s subjects I found that some of the photos were hard to look at.

For instance the photo Taliban, I found was quite disturbing. Which is basically a portrait of a Taliban soldier lying dead in the middle of a ditch. He cause the controversy by combining reportage and art.  Although it highlights a truth I found that ethics were crossed here considering the fact that he was taking a picture of a real life dead person which I found slightly insensitive.

In and over mediated world, this photograph is Delahaye’s questioning of the role in reporting as well as question what happens to these images once they are removed from magazines or taken down from the walls in galleries.

Furthermore, I do think that some other reviewers make a valid point when they say that there are pits end of the lowest class in every society, and in the case of the Russians depicted in these photos, they are no more a great representation of Russia as a whole than Harlem denizens could represent all of New York.

Overall I do like Luc Delahaye’s work and I think that is probably one of the best photojournalists there is out there today. I also found that his images are compelling and thought and I can only admire his dedication to producing such images. I found that his books are well-produced book although I found most of his work extremely depressing. In my opinion his books well documented studies of poverty and abject misery as well as a depiction of cultural events. Looking through his work, you could only wonder what mental state he must have been after having spent so much time in an oppressively miserable environment considering that as a viewer you can only be disturbed by the images, forgetting that he is in the midst of these events.

Delahaye said in his 2003 Artnet interview that: "Reporters in the press see the Afghan landscape but they don't show it, they are not asked to. All my efforts have been to be as neutral as possible, and to take in as much as possible, and allow an image to return to the mystery of reality." I do agree that he does display this in his series although his approach to some of the situations I do find quite questionable.

I also do agree with the fact that the "mystery of reality" is what perfectly describes his photographs and it does have a certain sonority when it’s applied too images of war as he does.

References 

The Guardian

Amazon

Artnet.com

Metropolism.com

Getty.edu

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