Luc Delahaye Quotes

Photojournalism is neither photography or journalism. It has its function but it's not where I see myself: the press is for me just a means for photographing, for material – not for telling the truth.

The denunciation of suffering by photography has replaced the religious justification of suffering in painting. Denunciation is a function of photojournalism, and in itself that's a step in the right direction.

You have to record as many details as possible and achieve an order, without taking away the complexity of the real. To voice the real and at the same time to create an image that is a world in itself, with its own coherence, its autonomy and sovereignty; an image that thinks

Being an artist is nothing, or at least, not enough; what you want is to be a poet.

There is something beautiful about photography; it allows the self to be reunited with the world.

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.

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.

There is the refusal of style and the refusal of sentimentalism, there is this desire for clarity.

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.