Luc Delahaye's 25-year retrospective opens at Photo Elysée
Luc Delahaye, Death of a Mercenary, 2011 © Courtesy de Luc Delahaye et de la galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris-Bruxelles.
LAUSANNE.—
The Echo of the World is a major solo retrospective of the work of Luc Delahaye (b. 1962). The exhibition at Photo Elysée, organized in collaboration with Jeu de Paume in Paris, looks back on a quarter-century of the French photographer’s output, featuring pieces produced between 2001 and 2025.
Holding a show on this scale underscores the museum’s commitment to a form of photography that critically engages with reality and its representations. Through his work, which stands out for its documentary style, formal discipline and inquiry into the nature of the image, Delahaye emphasizes the importance of holding the spectacle of current events at a distance and adding new layers of depth to the visible.
In today’s age of image overload and growing uncertainty as to the boundaries of reality, the show shines a spotlight on the practice of a photographer who thinks deeply about the world around him, and for whom “to see is to be present – a deliberate act.”
EXHIBITION
Through his mostly large-scale color works – documenting conflicts in Haiti, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine, as well as OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) conferences and COP (Conference of the Parties) – Delahaye examines the turbulent world we inhabit, and the forums that are supposed to bring order to chaos, from a position of critical distance.
Whether captured in a single shot or assembled from fragments on a computer over several months, Delahaye’s photographs always bring us face to face with reality, experienced either immediately or after the fact. He seeks to articulate this reality from a purely documentary stance, without demonstration.
Alongside Delahaye’s photographic output from the past 25 years, the exhibition also features What’s Going On (2025), a vast installation that charts the dislocations of the modern world, offering a reflection on the meaning of history, violence, beauty and the viewer’s eye.
LUC DELAHAYE
Delahaye, a former member of the Magnum agency and a leading photojournalist in the 1990s, paved the way for a new generation of photographers who re-examined the relationship between documentary and artistic practice. In the early 2000s, he abandoned press work and took his practice in a different direction, pursuing a particular interest in large-scale, standalone photographic tableaux.
Between 2001 and 2005, he worked primarily with panoramas, using the format’s breadth to widen the field of view, hold his subjects at a distance and invite multiple interpretations. For Delahaye, the panorama became a space for observation stripped of emotion, offering a zoomed-out view of human experiences.
Starting in 2004, he began producing digitally composed images assembled from multiple shots, as well as deliberately staged scenes. This shift saw him working chiefly on a computer, as his practice increasingly resembled a form of writing. At the same time, his works grew in size, bringing the human figure more forcefully into view, while his focus on detail rooted the images in lived reality. Even so, the moment of capture remained central to Delahaye’s practice: his works were always dated according to when the original shot was taken, pointing to a tension between compositional construction and faithfulness to reality.
In the 2010s, Delahaye began exploring new avenues, producing videos, working in black and white, and experimenting with multi-image works through sequences, series and polyptychs. The silhouettes typical of his earlier practice gave way to life size depictions of soldiers, prisoners, displaced people, street children and other vulnerable groups – all people living through pain and suffering – adding a more universal dimension to his compositions.
Through these images, Delahaye no longer sought merely to tell a story, but also to lend weight and presence to these silent lives.
These days, Delahaye moves freely between these different approaches – digital composition, staging and in-the-moment shots – to produce images stripped of both the artist’s subjectivity and the contingencies of reality.
PUBLICATION
The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Luc Delahaye: Catalogue Raisonné 2001–2025, edited by Quentin Bajac and published jointly by Steidl, Jeu de Paume and Photo Elysée. The book lists all 74 works produced by Delahaye over the past quarter- century.
