It is unnerving to walk out of a museum exhibit feeling less knowledgeable and worldly than when you walked in. But that is surprisingly the effect after one hour in a gallery consisting of only 10 pictures.
“Recent History: Photographs of Luc Delahaye” at the Getty Center displays the often unseen side of recent world events ranging from natural disasters to wars and genocide. Yet rather than informing the viewer, the images make the situations seem entirely too complex to fully understand.
Delahaye’s photos demand the viewer’s attention, if not by subject matter and camera angles, then just by their sheer sizes, most of which start at knee level and end several feet above the eye. The scale allows the viewer to see both the intricate details and the broader circumstances.
Delahaye’s photos are a drastic change from the adjoining exhibit, which houses American photographer Edward Weston’s small-scale black and white prints.
Delahaye’s photos have an eerie way of making the viewer a part of the picture.
The “Registration of Internally Displaced People in Eastern Chad” engulfs the viewer into a circle of vibrantly clothed women waiting to register for the distribution of food. The upward angle of the photograph and its height of over 9 feet draws me into the pack of women near the bottom of the circle. I could even read the names written on the clipboard of the man in charge of the registration, and I caught myself looking for my own name.
Delahaye’s photographs have the odd combination of making onlookers feel like they are included in the picture while also making them feel uncomfortably out of place.
Standing over a mass grave in “Musenyi” or in front of the rubble after a tsunami in “Aftermath in Meulaboh,” I realized how little I really knew about what it must be like to experience disasters and tragedies firsthand rather than watching them from the comfort of my home. Delahaye’s photographs provoke uneasiness: The rubble, the people and the clipboards are life-sized and so crisp that it almost feels real enough to reach out and touch.
By far the most poignant piece was “Taliban,” a horizontal photograph that showed a young Taliban soldier who had just been shot and killed in Afghanistan during an offensive of the Northern Alliance.
The victim’s dead eyes were haunting. His pockets had all been emptied, his shoes stolen and his wallet ransacked.
Attendants who walked by had strong responses: They stared for about five minutes, walking up close to view the bloody wounds or look into the victim’s eyes or at his shoeless feet and then stepped back again to get a view of the bigger picture before finally walking away.
He looked so innocent and helpless, in part because it was just an image: The event had already taken place, and a viewer couldn’t do anything but stare at his fate.
Attendants cannot help but be all encompassed in these gigantic displays of documentary photography. Studying the photographs both close up and at a distance give different dimensions to the story being told.
But no matter how or where a person looks, the exhibit leaves you with a different view of world events and a different way in which news is received and interpreted.
““ Lauren Schick
E-mail Schick at lschick@media.ucla.edu.