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.

Taken well after the violence occurred, these pictures put its legacy -- of loss, horror and outrage -- in the spotlight. They also suggest that the drama is not over, that other people will enter the picture, seeking justice, revenge or some muddled combination of the two.

That’s what happens in the other five photographs. The responses of governments, agencies, organizations, commissions and individuals are depicted as civilized society strives to manage ecological disasters and repair the damage done by war, corruption and greed.

In a 2002 image of Slobodan Milosevic, on trial for crimes against humanity, the former president of Yugoslavia looks like a respectable businessman in a banal, high-tech office. In the show’s only vertical work, a crowd of women from the village of Koubigou, Chad, wait as a worker registers them for international aid. And at a 2006 election rally in Minsk, Belarus, supporters of opposition candidate Alexander Milinkevich stand stoically beneath a steel sky. Their somber faces suggest that they are on intimate terms with disappointment and are used to being lied to by politicians.

A bird’s-eye view of a hotel in Baghdad and a seamless, multi-shot collage of an OPEC meeting in Vienna show journalists at work, scurrying to get the story and waiting, anxiously, to report the next development.

Delahaye’s photographs are not optimistic. Some are dark. Many focus on grim subjects, zeroing in on humanity’s inhumanity. But they are too stubborn to give in to despair and too defiant to succumb to seen-it-all, world-weary cynicism. That gives them their tough beauty.

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‘Recent History: Photographs by Luc Delahaye’

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and Sundays; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays

Ends: Nov. 25

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 440-7300 or www.getty.edu