THE PHOTOGRAPH, framed without margins
and behind Plexiglas, is just under four and a half
feet high by nearly nine and a half feet wide. Its title is A Lunch at the
Belvedere, and it depicts an actual event that took place at the Hotel
Belvedere in
The man who made A Lunch at the Belvedere,
Luc Delahaye, today in his early forties, is a French photographer who began
his career as a photojournalist, specifically a war photographer, for Newsweek
and similar publications and went on to enjoy great success in that field, winning
the Robert Capa Gold Medal twice, in 1993 and 2002, and the Prix Niépce in
2002. At some point in the early 1990s, however, he began to chafe at the
constraints of his trade and to explore various “artistic” possibilities for
which there were no precedents in what he had hitherto done. So, for example,
he organized the making of a series of pictures of homeless Parisians by asking
each to have his or her photo taken alone in a photo booth while Delahaye
deliberately looked away. This led to a further project, a series of
black-and-white portraits shot on the Métro with a hidden camera. The reference
for this was of course Walker Evans’s subway portraits of 1938–41, but with a
difference: Whereas Evans’s subtly differentiated subjects sit across the central
aisle from him and are variously framed from one shot to another, Delahaye’s
photos seem to have been taken at very close range, with his subjects’ heads
occupying most of the rectangle and their features depicted in sharp focus and
strong contrasts of light and shadow as they look off to one side or the
other—anywhere, we feel, but at the photographer. L’Autre, a collection
of ninety such portraits, was published as a book in 1999 (Phaidon). The
cumulative effect as one turns the pages is hallucinatory in its intensity: The
sameness of the compositional schema throws into relief not only the
physiognomic distinctness of the individual subjects but equally their uniform
determination, as it comes to seem, to absent themselves as much as possible
from their immediate circumstances. For still another project Delahaye traveled
for four months during the winter of 1996 from Moscow to Vladivostok,
photographing in garish color people living mostly sorry lives in squalid
surroundings; a book gathering a selection of these photos, Winterreise,
came out in 2000 (Phaidon).
Much more might usefully be said about these
projects, L’Autre especially, but my purpose here is to call attention
to Delahaye’s latest venture, a series of panoramic, large-scale (in most cases,
roughly eight-by-four-feet) photographs of subjects taken from the image
repertoire of photojournalism but treated in a manner that could not diverge
further from photojournalistic norms. Ten photos of that type, under the title “History,”
were exhibited early in 2003 at the Ricco/Maresca
Gallery in New York City; I missed that show, but, alerted to Delahaye’s recent
work by Quentin Bajac’s excellent article in last summer’s Les Cahiers du
Musée national d’art moderne, I spent several days in Paris this past
November in order to catch his exhibition of seventeen recent pictures at La
Maison Rouge. On the strength of Bajac’s commentary I expected to be impressed
(always a dangerous state of mind)—and, in fact, I was.
As the aforementioned work suggests, what
Delahaye has done in his new project is play subject matter against format and
all that goes with it. Thus he seeks out subjects of a sort that would
ordinarily belong to his earlier practice as a photojournalist—a dead Taliban
lying in a ditch, the bombing of Taliban positions in Afghanistan by an
American B-52, a handful of Northern Alliance fighters advancing in a
mountainous landscape, the Jenin refugee camp on the West Bank after combat
between the Palestinians and the Israelis, Slobodan Milošević? about to be
tried in The Hague, central Baghdad four days after the taking of the city by
American forces, the Security Council at the UN on the occasion of Colin Powell’s
speech claiming that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and the
Musharraf-Soros lunch at the Hotel Belvedere, to name just eight. But instead
of shooting each at close range with a lightweight handheld camera in pursuit
of highly dramatic, compositionally arresting, and instantly legible fragments
of larger situations—the photojournalistic norm—he employs large-format,
frequently panoramic cameras in order to include vastly more of the scene
before him in terms both of lateral extension and of sheer quantity of visual
information. Although one is not made aware of the fact by the images
themselves, he occasionally takes multiple shots from a single vantage point
over a period of time and then digitally combines them to arrive at the final
image—this, in fact, is how A Lunch at the Belvedere was composed. And
by printing his photos at large scale, he ensures that their wealth of minute
detail is made available to the viewer. The photographs that result, as Bajac
notes, involve a balance of opposing forces. So, for example, there is in most
a strong sense of distance, even withdrawal, on the part of the photographer:
The viewer quickly becomes aware that a basic protocol of these images rules
out precisely the sort of feats of capture—of fast-moving events,
extreme gestures and emotions, vivid momentary juxtapositions of persons and
things, etc.—that one associates with photojournalism at its bravura best. At
the same time, the photographs in their sheer breadth and detail extend an
invitation to the viewer to approach closely, to peer intently at one or
another portion of the pictorial field, in short to become engrossed or indeed
immersed in intimate contemplation of all that the image offers to be seen. Put
slightly differently, there is in all these works an emphasis on the sheer
openness of the image, its total accessibility to vision, as if the
photographer has somehow managed to withdraw so as to make way for reality
itself. But precisely because this is so, the viewer is given only the most
minimal indications of where to look; unlike a photojournalistic image, which
is effective only insofar as it makes a single vivid point, Delahaye’s
panoramic images in their richness and complexity (and also, in a manner of
speaking, their simplicity) leave the viewer to shift for himself or herself—in
the case of A Lunch at the Belvedere, to recognize Musharraf and Soros,
and then by looking closely to “activate” the discreet but palpable drama at
the photo’s heart. This in turn is why the viewer tends to feel that the
significant details he or she comes to invest with significance—the exchange between
Musharraf and Soros, or in Northern Alliance Fighters, 2001, a very
different work, the precise movements of the already distant Northern Alliance
soldiers as they advance away from the camera over the crest of a ridge or
various incidental features of the rutted and forbidding landscape—are
discovered by him or her rather than delivered personally by the photographer.
But because the viewer knows or at least believes that this is not the case,
the ultimate effect of those details is to underscore the effect of art: hence
my emphasis, in the opening description of A Lunch at the Belvedere, on
what I characterized as the “accuracy” of the depiction of gesture and
expression—as if the latter somehow had been delineated by the photographer
rather than automatically recorded by his equipment. And in fact there was
nothing automatic about Delahaye’s choice of subject, positioning of his
camera, or selection of a suitable moment—not Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive
moment” so much as one that allows a maximum of slow, exploratory penetration
by the viewer. Not to mention whatever was done to the composition when he
revised it with a computer (in that sense, there is no telling where recording
leaves off and delineation begins).
One obvious term of comparison is with the
reconstructive “near documentary” aesthetic of Jeff Wall, but even more
telling, I think, is the contrast between Delahaye’s panoramic pictures and the
work of Andreas Gursky, whose large-scale and often fantastically detailed
images put a similar premium on sheer visibility while simultaneously cutting
themselves off, “severing” themselves, from any corporally imaginable relation
to photographer or viewer: Distance in Gursky tends to be absolute, not, as in
Delahaye, the dialectical other to proximity and immersion. It is as though in
the end Delahaye’s panoramic pictures, exactly opposite to Gursky’s work,
aspire to yield an imaginative experience of something like merger with the
world—an aspiration that may well strike a wholly original note in contemporary
photography.
Michael
Fried is J. R. Herbert Boone professor of humanities at