“(…) there has to be a photograph in the newspaper. Or an image which emerges from reading an article. The
journalistic way of relating facts, which is to say incompletely, without affect or commentary, is the best stimulus
for the imagination: it lets me see situations. Nothing which happens during these first moments can help me later
on, except by setting something off, but that’s still where everything begins.“
In this way Luc Delahaye’s pictures are often made at sites and events from which newspapers report everyday.
They indicate an approach that is both direct and detached, where the unromantic clarity of the documentary
style contradicts and enhances the dramatic intensity of the “tableau” form. Within their visual coherence, they
express a nub of formal tensions and invite the beholder to reflect on the relationship between art, history and
information through a distanced contemplation.
Luc Delahaye was born in 1962. This book, his first with Steidl, is published at the occasion of the exhibition of
his most recent works at the Nathalie Obadia Gallery in Paris.
2006-2010
von Luc Delahaye
