The Lens Is Standard, the Photos Anything But Mr. Delay has covered a great deal of tragedy during his time in Africa, but his images are often quieter and less dramatic than those of some of his colleagues. He says that he has to create aesthetic images to get editors and readers to pay attention to the important stories that are happening in Africa. “We have to talk about the exploitation of the land and the people,” he said. “But there are few happy stories in Africa. People are sick and tired of the cliché of people starving to death in Africa and people chopping heads off. I’m not sure that my job is to make you laugh. Really, my job is to tell you what is going on.” Since 1995, Mr. Delay has documented suffering in the Democratic Republic of Congo on a scale that is almost unimaginable. More than five million people have perished in conflicts, and civilians are repeatedly uprooted and often on the move, fleeing from one military force or another. “There are many different forces, ranging from bad, to very bad, to very, very bad guys,” he said. His task is to take photographs that will make the viewer stop and look at them in a world that is flooded with more than a billion pictures every day. While many photojournalists seek more complexity, Mr. Delay craves direct images that are both accessible and aesthetically pleasing. Having driven more than 8,000 miles in Mali, he finds the country to be astoundingly beautiful. During much of the conflict, when the Malian military kept photographers far from the front lines, Mr. Delay sought other ways of showing the effects of the conflict: through empty streets and closed stores, for example, with photos that are simple, yet arresting. “I try to apply the rules of contemporary art to news photography in order to make pictures that will be more likely to be looked at,” he said, ...
Posted on: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 15:38:10 +0000
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