Luc Delahaye
[Photographer, b. 1962, Tours, France, lives in Paris.]
There is something beautiful about photography; it allows the self to be reunited with the world.
What you want to be is a poet…. To voice the real and at the same time create an image that is a world in itself, with its own coherence, its autonomy and sovereignty; an image that thinks.
If an image is powerful enough, if it resists us, if, by its obscure coherence, part of it escapes our understanding, then it means that something has been won from reality.
I want to show the event at the very moment it takes place.... My body must be anchored to the ground and seek the best point of view, without any visual taboos. But then, at the heart of the event, my effort is to disappear, I introduce a distance that borders on indifference.
There is the refusal of style and the refusal of sentimentalism, there is this desire for clarity...
Being an artist is nothing, or at least, not enough; what you want is to be a poet.
I consider the act of taking pictures as an artistic performance in itself: a sum of movements, which have no finality other than their own perfection. I am the only viewer of this part. The consequence is “being there,” fully and simply, without affects or emotions.
I was twenty when I discovered war and photography. I can’t say that I wanted to bear witness and change the world. I had no good moral reasons: I just loved adventure, I loved the poetry of war, the poetry of chaos, and I found that there was a kind of grace in weaving between the bullets.
