Photo Elysée presents a major solo exhibition dedicated to Luc Delahaye (FR, 1962), in collaboration with the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Entitled “Le bruit du monde,” it retraces twenty-five years of his photographic work, from 2001 to 2025.
This large-scale retrospective reaffirms Photo Elysée’s commitment to photography that questions reality and its representations. Luc Delahaye’s work is distinguished by its documentary approach, formal rigor, and reflection on the image. It underscores the need for photography that distances itself from the spectacle of current events and gives new depth to the visible.
Faced with the proliferation of images and the increasing blurring of the boundaries of reality, this exhibition highlights Delahaye’s photography, which contemplates the world and for whom “the gaze is an engagement of presence, an act.”
THE EXHIBITION
From the Iraq War to the war in Ukraine, from Haiti to Libya, from OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) conferences to COP (Conference of the Parties) conferences, Luc Delahaye explores the noise of the world and the places meant to regulate it. His large-format photographs, mostly in color, offer a detached representation of contemporary chaos.
Sometimes taken in a single shot, sometimes veritable compositions digitally assembled over months, his photographs are always an encounter with reality, whether immediate or delayed. A reality he presents with a kind of documentary detachment, without demonstration.
The exhibition brings together photographs produced by the artist over the past twenty-five years and also features a monumental installation, What’s Going On (2025), an atlas of contemporary disorder and a meditation on the meaning of history, on violence, on beauty, and on our gaze.
Luc Delahaye paved the way for a new generation of photographers who have revitalized the relationship between documentary practice and artistic expression. A renowned war photojournalist in the 1990s and a former member of the Magnum agency, he decided at the turn of the 21st century to leave the world of journalism to develop new forms of expression. The photographic tableau, an exemplary form of the autonomous image, became the focus of his research.
Between 2001 and 2005, he favored the use of the panoramic format, which allows for a broadening of vision, a distancing from the subject, and an open interpretation. For Delahaye, this format became a space for observation devoid of emotion and conducive to a broader perspective on human situations.
From 2004 onwards, this approach gave way to digital compositions created from multiple shots, as well as staged scenes. The computer became his primary tool, and his practice became more akin to writing. This evolution was accompanied by a broadening of formats, affirming the presence of the human figure. Detail anchors the image in reality. Yet, the moment of the shot remains central: his works are always dated the day of the initial capture, revealing a tension between compositional work and fidelity to reality.
In the 2010s, he turned to new experiments: video, black and white, and explorations to transcend the single image through sequences, series, and polyptychs. Silhouettes become bodies on the scale of the viewer, acquiring a universal value. Soldiers, prisoners, displaced persons, wandering children, vulnerable people—Delahaye portrays a people of suffering. The image no longer seeks merely to narrate, but to give substance to these silent presences.
Today, Luc Delahaye embraces all these methods—digital composition, staging, snapshots—to create images liberated from both the subjectivity of their creator and the contingencies of reality.
The exhibition is conceived and organized by the Jeu de Paume, Paris, in collaboration with Photo Elysée.
Commissaire : Quentin Bajac
Luc Delahaye : Le bruit du monde
March 6 – May 31 2026
Photo Elysée
Pl. de la Gare 17
1003 Lausanne, Suisse
https://elysee.ch/
PUBLICATION
The exhibition is accompanied by a reference work, Luc Delahaye: Catalogue Raisonné 2001–2025, co-published by Steidl, the Jeu de Paume, and Photo Elysée, edited by Quentin Bajac. This catalogue raisonné lists all 74 works created by the artist over the past twenty-five years.
