ART REVIEW - Big pictures instead of the news
We live in the age of the close-up. Digital imagery, point-blank sensation and the growing addiction to instantaneous communication make for an era in which standing back to see the big picture seems so last century -- before camera-phone videos, behind-the-scene scandals and website hits became the language of the day.
At the J. Paul Getty Museum, Luc Delahaye's panoramic photographs of world events convey the old-fashioned idea that it takes time to make sense of things. Delahaye's large color prints range in size from about 4 by 8 feet to 5 by 12. They grab your eyes and command your attention. But sound bites, one-liners and easy answers are nowhere to be found in the French photojournalist's vivid pictures of political hot spots around the world.
All are filled with such an abundance of detail, so many layers of meaning and such potential for conflicting interpretations that it's impossible to scan them swiftly or extract a simple message. Unlike art that is meant to be seen in a split second and is no more nuanced than any other spectacle that wants only to be gawked at, the 10 works from 2001-06 in "Recent History: Photographs by Luc Delahaye" demand that viewers take time to think.
Second looks are required. Second thoughts follow. And doubt -- about ever knowing enough to understand the complex events Delahaye depicts so differently from the way they are seen on TV -- fuels your desire to find out more about the world in which we all live.
Five of the photographs depict the aftermath of cataclysmic violence, both natural disasters (an Indonesian city leveled by the tsunami from the December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake) and man-made tragedies (a rubble-strewn refugee camp in the West Bank after a fierce battle between Palestinian militants and the Israeli army).
Three of these aftermath pictures feature graves. The largest photo in the exhibition shows four specialists methodically disinterring the skeletal remains from a mass grave near the village of Snagovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Another, from the village of Musenyi, Rwanda, portrays a community at a burial ceremony for 80 anonymous victims on the 10th anniversary of the genocide. And the most riveting picture is the simplest: a horizontal shot straight down into a ditch outside Kabul, Afghanistan, where a dead Taliban soldier lies, his throat slit, boots stolen, eyes half-open, wallet rifled and tossed aside. If the details were different, the handsome young man would appear to be sleeping peacefully.
- Lange's eye on America Oct 13, 2002
- Charles Passela; Photos Illuminated Museum Art Jan 18, 2000
- Israel Museum receives $12 million for photography Oct 29, 2005
