[Summer 2026]
Being in the Real
by Stephen Horne
[EXCERPT]
A photograph can show a scene that becomes meaningful only in and as its representation. Documentary photography purports to offer and demand specificity, adhering to the principles of realism. This is what characterized the French photographer Luc Delahaye’s work prior to the year 2000, when he made a “turning” from objective fact toward the modality of affect. Since then, he has resituated his work away from the practice of “realist” documentary to one of aesthetic experience. This has included exposing his work in a new audience/viewer environment, moving from news media to art gallery, and now to art museum.
During this new period, it’s as if he has revised the preceding two decades of his own work, including its profile in his memory. In these photographs we see images accompanied by a recognition that something central to the previous works has been evacuated in order to allow a radically new feeling for the space and time of the photographic image. What sharpens this perception is that in his prior practice Delahaye was concerned primarily with images of “history in action,” Robert Capa’s “raw and immediate realities of war,” whereas now he stresses memory, with its plural understandings of time. He engages a strategic aestheticization to disrupt realism as it is typically practised and theorized. It’s an interesting subterfuge, and a double game.
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[ Numéro complet, en version papier et numérique, disponible ici : Ciel variable 132 – TABLEAUX ]
[ L’article complet en version numérique est disponible ici : TITRE ARTICLE]
Born in Tours in 1962, Luc Delahaye first distinguished himself as a photojournalist with his war reporting; in the 2000s, he turned to a more poetic practice, though he kept one foot in documentary photography. His work has featured in solo exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Kunsthal Rotterdam, and other prestigious institutions. He has received the Prix Pictet (2012), the Robert Capa Gold Medal (1992, 2002), the Prix Niépce (2002), and three World Press Photo awards (1992, 1993, 2001), among others. He is represented by Galerie Nathalie Obadia. www.nathalieobadia.com/fr/artists/38-luc-delahaye/overview
Stephen Horne is a Montreal art writer living in France.