The Jeu de Paume museum in Paris is presenting a major monographic exhibition dedicated to Luc Delahaye, one of the most remarkable figures in contemporary photography. Born in Tours in 1962, Delahaye was among the greatest photojournalists of the 1990s before leaving Magnum Photos and immediate news coverage in 2000 to integrate his photojournalistic vision into contemporary art. After 20 years without exhibiting in Paris, curator Quentin Bajac is now presenting 70 of his works created since his artistic transition.
The exhibition covers Delahaye's photographic production between 2001 and 2025, a decisive period corresponding to his withdrawal from photojournalism and his commitment to the art field. As a former war photojournalist and Magnum member, he belongs to a generation of photographers who reworked the relationship between documentary practices and artistic dimensions. For twenty-five years, his photographs, most often large-format and in color, have offered a representation of the disorders of the contemporary world.
From the Iraq War to the conflict in Ukraine, from Haiti to Libya, from OPEC conferences to COP summits, Delahaye explores what he calls "the noise of the world" and the places meant to regulate it. His photographs are always an encounter with reality, whether immediate or deferred. Sometimes created in a single shot, sometimes as true compositions assembled by computer over months from image fragments, his work maintains a fundamental connection to the real world.
"To arrive through a form of absence, through a form of unconsciousness perhaps, at a unity with reality. A silent unity," Delahaye explains. "The practice of photography is quite beautiful: it allows this reunification of oneself with the world." This philosophy of documentary withdrawal, without demonstration, characterizes his approach to capturing reality in its complexity.
The exhibition, the first in Paris since 2005, offers a retrospective look at twenty-five years of creation. It brings together about forty large-format works, some previously unseen and created for the occasion, a video about the Syrian conflict that Delahaye has been working on for years, and a large installation in a new format for the artist. The exhibition also provides insight into his creative process through visual sources and rejected images.
From the late 1990s, Delahaye diversified the distribution methods of his images beyond the press, notably publishing several author books. "Portraits/1" (1996), a series of portraits of homeless people taken in photo booths, "Memo" (1997), a collection of portraits of Bosnian war victims extracted from obituary pages of a Sarajevo newspaper, and "The Other" (1999), a series of subway traveler portraits taken without their knowledge and without looking through the viewfinder, all demonstrate his desire to erase the operator and depersonalize the gaze.
Between 2001 and 2005, Delahaye employed a panoramic camera, producing large-format images with elongated proportions. This format allowed for an expansion of vision, distancing from the subject, and open reading. The operator seems absent; the viewer is never in the image but facing it. The panorama became a means for Delahaye to construct an observation space devoid of affect, conducive to an expanded vision of human situations, whether refugee camps, UN meetings, or funeral ceremonies in Rwanda.
From 2005 onward, panoramic photography gave way to other modalities: digital compositions from multiple shots and staged scenes. Delahaye sought to capture the complexity of a situation in a single image while maintaining fundamental ambiguity and refusing any univocal interpretation. This evolution was accompanied by an expansion of formats, affirming the presence of the human figure, where detail became essential in anchoring the image in reality.
Over time, Delahaye travels less and for shorter periods; the computer has become his primary tool, and his practice increasingly resembles writing. The studio, a place of solitude and composition, has become the laboratory for developing essentially conceived images. The process of transforming reality has become more complex and lengthy, yet the moment of capture remains central, with works always dated from the day of initial capture.
A revealing example of this logic is how Delahaye dates his work "Syrian Army Soldiers, Aleppo, November 2012" to 2012, even though it's a complex composition created in 2023 from views taken during the Syrian conflict and shown for the first time in this exhibition. This fidelity to the moment reveals a tension between compositional work and presence in reality.
The 2010s witnessed an opening of vocabulary, accompanied by new experiences: video, return to black and white in an impersonal aesthetic, and research to go beyond the single image through sequences, series, or polyptychs. The treatment of the human figure also evolved: silhouettes became bodies, at the viewer's scale. The individuals represented, often anonymous, acquired universal value as Delahaye drew a people of sorrows: soldiers, prisoners, displaced persons, wandering children, vulnerable people, men and women absorbed in their tasks.
His work in India (2013), Senegal (2019-2020), and the West Bank (2015-2017) constitutes closed ensembles, on the margins of his main body of work. These projects focus on a form of everyday facts and gestures, underpinned by specific concerns: the programmed disappearance of a village in India, manual work and the sacred in Senegal, and ordinary life and forms of resistance in occupied territory.
Today, Delahaye doesn't forbid himself any of these paths or methods – digital composition, staging, instantaneous image – even if staging and composition remain paramount for developing images freed from both the author's subjectivity and the contingency of reality. Through Delahaye's work, the Jeu de Paume exhibition describes a state of the world in this first quarter of the 21st century: a tormented world dominated by tumult, where conflicts and wars, as well as their echoes within international institutions and bodies, hold a preponderant place.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a reference publication in the form of a reasoned catalog reproducing and inventorying all 74 works created by the artist over these twenty-five years. "Luc Delahaye: The Noise of the World" runs from October 10, 2025, to January 4, 2026, at Jeu de Paume, 1 Place de la Concorde, Jardin des Tuileries, 75001 Paris.
