All 693 images in a series created by Luc Delahaye over several years using details from photographs cut out of newspapers, marking a turning point in the evolution of this great photographer's work, which bridges documentary and artistic practices.
For years, Luc Delahaye cut out from newspapers the photographs that caught his attention, using them as work documents meant to feed his reflection or prompt a departure. In 2006, this practice gradually drifted from its initial purpose and took on a life of its own, becoming a proliferating, endless accumulation that embodied a certain vision of the world. A rather dark vision, grounded as much in the experience of an observer of his time as in that of a photographer engaged with reality.
It was not until 2020 that this material was given its current form: photographs of photographs, presented as enlarged details, in a single format, without commentary or captions. Drawn mainly from the New York Times and Le Monde, the original documents span the years 2006–2012 and include news photographs, archival images, reproductions of works of art, and all manner of other images printed in newspapers. The work, completed in 2025, consists of 693 prints.
What's Going On is an atlas of contemporary disorder, a history of the world — of a world that reveals itself in its entirety and becomes indecipherable in proportion to its visibility. In its multiple dimensions, it is a waking dream traversed by its author's obsessions, a mise en abyme and a questioning of his position as photographer and witness, a meditation on the meaning of history, on violence, on beauty, on our gaze.
This book brings together all 693 images.
The work of Luc Delahaye (born 1962) is grounded in a rigorous and austere approach that makes full use of the possibilities of photographic recording and gives the experience of reality as much weight as the image itself. A war photojournalist in the 1980s and 1990s and a former member of Magnum, he chose to follow a different path in 2001. His photographs, often large in scale, convey a presence in the world and, with restraint yet directly, bear witness to this troubled world inhabited by individuals confronted with the upheavals of history, from present-day wars to the memory of past conflicts.
