Luc Delahaye was born in 1962 in Tours (France). He lives and works in Paris (Paris).
Luc Delahaye started his career as a photojournalist. In 1986, he joined the Sipa Press agency and dedicated to the war reporting. He went to Lebanon, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Chechnya. Then, in 1994, he joined Magnum Agency and collaborated with many international reviews as Newsweek. In 2004, he left Magnum to dedicate to his personal artistic work, which has begun since the 2000's.
His works has been the object of major solo exhibitions, in particular at the : J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, USA, 2007), Sprengel Museum Hanover (Hanover, Germany, 2006), Maison Rouge - Fondation Antoine de Galbert (Paris, France, 2006), Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, USA, 2005), Huis Marseille (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2004), National Media Museum (Bradford, UK, 2004), Kunsthal Rotterdam (The Netherlands, 2002).
His work joined many prestigious private and public collections such as : Boston Museum of Fine Arts (USA), Centre Pompidou - Musée National d'Art Moderne (Paris, France), Chrysler Museum (Norfolk, USA), Det Nationale Fotomuseum (Copenhagen, Denmark), Fonds National d'Art Contemporain (France), Fondation Antoine de Galbert (Paris, France), Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris, France), Frac Aquitaine (Bordeaux, France), Gemeentemuseum (Helmond, The Netherlands), High Museum of Art (Atlanta, USA), Huis Marseille (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), ICP - International Center of Photography (New York, USA), J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, USA), Bank of America (Chicago, USA), Lhoist (Limelette, Belgium), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (USA), Minneapolis Institute of Arts (USA), MOMA - Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (France), Musée de Grenoble (France), Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon (Spain), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, Canada), National Media Museum (Bradford, UK), SFMOMA - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (USA), Tate Modern (London, UK), The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse (Miami, USA).
Luc Delahaye has received many awards such as : Prix Pictet (2012), Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2005), Prix Robert Capa Gold Medal (2002, 1992), Prix Niépce (2002), World Press Photo (2001, 1993, 1992), l'ICP - Infinity Award (2001), Prix Oskar Barnack (2000).
His artistic work has also been published in: Portrait/1 (Sommaire, 1996), Memo (Hazan, 1997), L'Autre (Phaidon, 1999), Winterreise (Phaidon, 2000), Une Ville (Xavier Barral, 2003), History (Chris Boot, 2003), Luc Delahaye 2006-2010 (Steidl, 2011).
Luc Delahaye has been represented by la Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels, since 2011.
With precision and rigour, Luc Delahaye constitutes a corpus that redetermines the new licenses of his image production; through the degree of intervention of the artist, new formal constraints, and his positioning between fiction and reality.
Whilst his work is loosely inspired by documentary photography and refers to his former activity as a photojournalist, Luc Delahaye's work liberates itself from the rules of the profession, whose practices he questions. With a production and a timeframe detached from the persistent flow of the media, the artist strives to take into account the complexity of the contemporary world by producing autonomous images - necessarily subjective but always critical in their content, on the periphery of the events that produce the chronicle of a news item - which is no less arbitrary.
With a strong simplicity that clears the attachment to the subject, Luc Delahaye offers photographs that place at the heart of his work the man acting and suffering in his immediate environment. By establishing a constantly reconsidered distance with his subject, the photographer reveals more than what you see. Neither too far away not to fall into the spectacular and theatrical, nor too close not to denounce himself as an intermediary, the scope is fair and necessary to try to provoke the illusion of a contact between the work and the spectator, which could take be done without the intervention of a third party.
Often large-format, the photographs encourage an almost physical engagement in the perception of the representation in order to understand the scene in its local complexity, and to capture its order in the recorded details. Successive shots that provide a peripheral view or a clear spatial structure are not hierarchical. The image is intended to be perceived in its entirety (but not totality) as it must have been in its reality. An impossible undertaking if there is one, but the spectator's hypothetical projection contributes precisely to opening up the meaning and producing intelligence in the image. It is only because its content (its form and context) acquires individual autonomy that rapprochement can work with the viewer. Luc Delahaye seeks to produce images that think, that enunciate reality while maintaining their coherence, preserving their sovereignty.
With prudence and discernment, Luc Delahaye initiates other possibilities - not exclusive in his protocol, his body of work and the chronicle of his work. For the first time in 2013, he begins the use of staged action, further blurring the fragile and volatile lines that delineate the parts of reality and fiction, because if the simulation is provoked, it is still true.
If the works do not tell stories, each of them is not exempt from a consistent narrative structure that would escape an easy interpretation. By presenting photographs that are clearly relevant to what could be our common destiny, Luc Delahaye strives to represent without complacency an ordinary humanity, not the world as it is. Beyond the alleged literality of the photographic medium, the artist questions our mode of reception of the images presented to invite us to a distanced and renewed contemplation. With measure and caution, he pursues his utopian quest for the right image: they are also worthy images that evoke the possibility of a humanism, however discreet it may be.