Luc Delahaye: Le bruit du monde

Born in 1962, Luc Delahaye is a major photojournalist of the 1990s and a former member of Magnum, part of a generation that reshaped the relationship between documentary and artistic practices. After years of publishing in the press and in photobooks, he turned in the 2000s towards large formats and gallery presentations, while keeping his images rooted in documentary concerns and tied to current events.

For over twenty-five years, his colour photographs, often monumental in scale, have depicted the disorder of the contemporary world. From the wars in Iraq and Ukraine to crises in Haiti and Libya, from OPEC summits to COP conferences, Delahaye explores both conflict zones and the institutional spaces meant to regulate them. His images confront visitors with a world in turmoil, and some may be disturbing.

His method alternates between immediacy and slow construction: some works are captured in a single shot, others assembled digitally over months from fragments of images. In both cases, they maintain a confrontation with reality. For Delahaye, photography represents “a silent unity with the real,” a practice that seeks withdrawal from demonstrative rhetoric to affirm presence through absence.

This exhibition, his first in Paris since 2005, offers a retrospective of twenty-five years of creation. It brings together around forty large-format photographs, including several new works made for the occasion, alongside a video on the Syrian conflict that has been in progress for many years, and a major installation in a new format for the artist.