Luc Delahaye (Photographer)

Luc Delahaye

Biography

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/).