Luc Delahaye, Le Bruit du Monde @ Jeu de Paume

Luc Delahaye, Taxi, 2016

After years of looking at Luc Delahaye's photographs, Luc Delahaye. le Bruit du Monde gives an opportunity to understand them. My long held ignorance of the Delahaye's photography may come from my own short sightedness that led, in turn, to a struggle to see the tension in the large format documentary works. Alternatively, it could be that the current exhibition at the Jeu de Paume gives a wonderful overview of his oeuvre, particularly highlighting his transition from documentary to art photographer. Seeing all the work in one place, Delahaye's search for "truth" and "reality" of the image across his career not only coheres the oeuvre, but reveals his multi-pronged approach. 

Luc Delahaye, The Milosevic Trial, 2002

What I appreciated in the early photographs in exhibition, particularly those that I had not seen before, was the discord between the space and the actions taking place therein. For example, the emotional void of the banal space in which Slobodan Milosevic's trial takes place. The bloody brutality of his crimes is nowhere to be seen in the trial room, thus creating a puzzling photograph that makes us take a closer a look, thinking that we might have missed something. Or witness the discrepancy between the darkened space and George W Bush's speech to European Allies following the end of the Gulf War. In the speech, Bush emphasized lasting peace in the Middle East and the end of conflict in Gaza as being within reach. Delahaye's darkened hall screams doubt: a doubt that has become a reality in the twenty years since the photograph was taken. 

Luc Delahaye, George Bush at Concert Noble, 2005

While, from the beginning, Delahaye's photographs have always manipulated reality—how can a photograph do otherwise—as the 2000s wore on, Delahaye turned more frequently to "composed photographs." These works are made of multiple images, to capture a reality or truth that is inherent to events before the camera. Delahaye removes the distortions of photography to make images closer to how we see the world. Nevertheless, the reality that he creates is never the one seen by a photograph, or the human eye. There is always a marked out of frame, the person doing the shooting, the bomb from which people are running, the man who is shot, do not appear in the image. We only ever see the results and traces of disaster. The depiction of the aftermath simply draws attention to the reality beyond the frame, that which is invisible to the eye.

Luc Delahaye, Les Pillards, Port-au-Prince, 2012

Delahaye sees the world through disaster eyes. Death, corruption, war and violence everywhere, greed and power running riot. Among the works on view are his black and white diary photographs in which he takes pictures of everything in his day. In these, we see images taken from newspapers, with figures such as Barack Obama, paintings, sculptures, Nicolas Sarkozy. No matter the content of the image, it's difficult to see them as about anything but power, and thus, continuing the violence. A photograph of Gerhard Richter's September painting is a typical Delahaye image - the aftermath of unspeakable violence, the tower spewing smoke, many times removed in a photograph of a painting of television images. So yes, Delahaye's work is about violence and the disasters of the world that we are living in, but it is also about the way that we see these events, and we are left asking, "what is the truth that lies behind them?" Both the events and the images. 

Luc Delahaye, Les Témoins, 2016

Finally, in one of the most exquisite works on display at the Jeu de Paume, Delahaye's Les Témoins, 2016 depicts inkjet print stills from a video recorded in February 2016 at a morgue in the city hospital in Jenin in the occupied West Bank. The video showed the ritual cleansing of three young Palestinian bodies following their attack on Israeli police in Jerusalem. In Delahaye's piece, we see hands laid over a chest, hands falling to a side, hands coming together, and in the middle, the head and shoulders of a body, taken from below. The reference is clear: the christ like imagery, and the practice of cleaning and praying for the dead as it is described in the bible. The coming together of the women to send the body off to the Lord. Of course, Delahaye's interest in the religious symbolism is, once again, around violence and death.