On photography.

Luc Delahaye, wondering about being an artist...
Interesting stuff for my teachers I guess.
I marked the passages that are in my mind too...

The Magnum and Newsweek photographer Luc Delahaye recently declared publicly that he was no longer a photojournalist. He was an artist. While this kind of talk would make Englishmen blush, the French are perfectly at ease cohabiting with art. For them, it is a relationship as normal as falling in love - and often not quite as daft.

"When did you become an artist?" I asked Delahaye, recalling his career covering the conflicts in Afghanistan, Rwanda, Bosnia, Israel/Palestine and the Gulf as a war photographer.

"Officially, three years ago," he said.

The zenith of this development is presented in a new collection of 13 vast, 1.1m x 2.3m panoramic prints of events between 2001 and 2002 - the prints include Milosevic On Trial, Ground Zero, George Bush At The UN, Jenin Refugee Camp; there are also scenes of death in Afghanistan and Kabul. The work is presented under the title History.

Delahaye's enormous new prints were on display in a New York gallery last year - for sale at $15,000 a print. Next week, they go on show in the UK, at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford. They have also been published in a smaller, album form, as a limited edition of 100 copies at $1,000 each.

We were in Delahaye's apartment in Montmartre, a geographical position that in his case gives off misleading signals - this is the Paris of the Moulin Rouge, of Doisneau's romantic canoodling snapshots, at best of Cartier-Bresson. And Delahaye is probably unique in being willing publicly to criticise the master and his legacy.

A wiry man of 41, a thoughtful and precise talker, Delahaye is often loosely described as being of peasant stock. But he is actually rooted in the maraîcher class: not true peasants, but the market gardeners who traditionally ringed and nourished French towns - Tours, in Delahaye's case. There is no known artistic background. So this is no Parisian aesthete.

He cooked lunch for me - smoked salmon, spaghetti, terrific cheeses, wine, of course - and we discussed at leisure his attitudes, his experiments and his claims for his work. At the heart of the discussion was the financial and artistic crisis that photojournalism is currently going through.

On the financial side, few magazines any longer commission photographers to go off for several months and produce an "essay". So, to consolidate their careers, photojournalists are inevitably looking to book production and the galleries.

On the aesthetic side, many photographers are going through a soul-searching similar to that of painters in the late 1800s when, for some at least, photography made figurative, naturalistic work redundant.

Now photographers are questioning their own realistic conventions and, above all, reacting against the new digital technology. The digital camera will do almost everything for the photographer - focus, judge the exposure, compensate for variations of light.

True, you can do your own cropping/editing there and then on the viewfinder-monitor, but - with the tactility of handling film gone and the darkroom gone - there is that old fear of the craftsman's intimate skills being overtaken by "the machine".

The very convenience of so much work being done for you can become a dilemma for the creative photographer. Some plunge in and push the technology further; others, like the painters of old, are looking critically at their craft.

In search of "answers" (essentially, a search for control), an artist might deliberately abandon all control of his instrument, in this case the camera - peculiar behaviour in the eyes of the layman, perhaps, but it has its logic. This is what Delahaye did.

"Ten years ago, when I was still a photojournalist," he explained, "I was beginning to confront the limitations of journalism. I asked extremely simple questions: what is a camera exactly? What happens when the shutter fires?" So, by way of a test, he gave clochards around the Gare du Nord 20 francs each to sit in photobooths and have their picture taken. Delahaye kept the pictures. His only act as a photographer was to put the coin in the slot.

What did he learn from the experience, I asked.

"Confirmation of what I already knew," Delahaye replied. "That the recording process is a magical process. You see that when you leave the camera on its own."

[fragment out of an interview, published in the Guardian, tx Jimmy, for forwarding this]

Posted on February 8, 2004
in Limit of my knowledge

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