The recent publication of Luc Delahaye’s Une Ville (Editions Xavier Barral, 2003) gives a fuller picture of this complex contemporary artist. The striking but unlikely range of his projects leads one to consider Delahaye not so much as a photographer but rather as a conceptual artist who uses photography.

Une Ville seems a curious sequel to Winterreise (Phaidon, 2000). The similar formats suggest that they are related. The dire straits and absolute grimness of the Eastern Russian landscape in Winterreise are softened in the Toulouse housing projects of Une Ville although they seem strangely emptied of people, abandoned literally and spiritually. The energy seems as drained as the colour. There is also the implicit political statement running through them about our ongoing failure to achieve any sort of Utopian society. The artist’s report is that life is grim in both locations, but that it goes on.

One would be reluctant to describe Delahaye as a reporter based on the visual evidence in his books; although this notion runs counter to expectation when people know about Delahaye as a former photojournalist. They seem to expect a certain immediacy in his photographs. But his published and exhibited works are not driven by quick hits of information. The History exhibition debuted at Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York in February 2003 and shows Delahaye’s ongoing series of large format panoramic images made in “hot spots” around the world, from Genoa to Iraq. That exhibition and subsequent museum shows have brought him into the “fine art” spotlight.

My own introduction to the History work was his dead Taliban (2001) soldier, a classically handsome, even elegiac, portrait described in terms reserved for ecstasies of the saints. The Taliban is misleading because it evokes a visceral and emotional response. Most of Delahaye’s work demands a different regard, more distanced and more considered, particularly when looking at his earlier work. In Portraits/1 (Sommaire,1996), he is not a photographer but rather the mediator of the image-making process, handing out change to homeless people to make their own photo-booth portraits. In Memo (Hazan, 1997), he has assembled Bosnian newspaper obituary photos. In L’Autre (Phaidon, 1999), he is shooting randomly on the subway. The artist offers up his own commentary:

“These experiences confirmed what is already known: that the recording process is a magical process. But I wanted the evidence, so I could move on. I consider the act of taking pictures as an artistic performance in itself: a sum of movements, which have no other finality than their own perfection. I am the only viewer of this part. The consequence is “being there”, fully and simply, without affects or emotions. I am now photographing the events of the world, what makes history. I am very much distant from what I see; this is my nature. I am looking for clarity, precision, detachment, trying to record as much detail as I can. This work is produced in large prints. I am trying to make “tableaux”, to make images which have density, harmony and mystery, a certain quality that takes you and resists you at the same time.“ (from: Brooks Johnson, Photography Speaks I and II, Revised editions, Chrysler Museum of Art and Aperture Foundation, to be published 2004)

Delahaye brings extraordinary intelligence and thought to his work. In her introduction to the limited edition Luc Delahaye – History (Chris Boot, 2003), Eugenia Parry talks about the utter banality of the scene of The Milosevic Trial, 2002: “Milosevic, photographed on trial in The Hague, is reduced to someone resembling a Registry Motor Vehicles Clerk, a bit player in the grander and slowly unfolding rhythms of history.” Delahaye isn’t looking for the punch to the gut, but rather the slow burn in your brain.

You ask yourself “What is this and why? How am I supposed to react?” Delahaye explains, “About ten years ago I asked myself extremely simple questions: ‘What is photography? What is a camera exactly? What happens when it is left on its own?’ The answers, and more, are in the images.”