Michael Fried interviews Luc Delahaye at nonsite:
It’s been twenty years since your exhibition at La Maison Rouge. That was my first encounter with your work and it also marked a radical turning-point for the photographer you were at the time. How do you see that exhibition today?
It was an important moment because, after four years, there was enough material to take stock of the work from that first period. Showing it in France also had a particular meaning for me as a statement. I was very conscious of the singular nature of my position, neither in one world nor the other. But the exhibition also marked the beginning of a new cycle because the two most recent photographs had been produced on a computer; I was initiating a new approach that was added to the direct documentary one of the first stage. This duality, which became part of my work at that point, corresponds to two ways of conceiving the role of the imagination. One utilises the unlimited, uncontrollable possibilities of the real; the other draws on the resources of the mind, which are more or less under control but limited. I had given myself a precise definition of this work on the computer: composing a picture from fragments of the real, captured within the conditions of reportage and captured to that end. I sensed that this was my path, and yet, at the beginning, it gave me the impression of doing work that wasn’t my own. Touching the image, altering the image, entering the image. I didn’t exactly see where I was going or what I could gain, but I knew what I might lose. And for me, this approach was not any more artistic than the first. This redefinition of the word “author” was a profound challenge to what I had always done
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