"In my head I am thinking only of the process," Delahaye went on. "Do I have enough light? Is the distance good? Speed too? This is what allows me to maintain an absence or distance to the event. If I impose myself too much, look for a certain effect, I'd miss the photo. This happened very fast; I need to make it slow. I see the two crossing in my mind."

The photograph is part of Delahaye's "History," a two-year-old project of documentary-style photographs taken with a large-format camera. The images are from global news hotspots -- from the Taliban soldier in a ditch to an inspection of a suspected chemical weapons plant in Iraq, from an exploded car in Bethlehem to George W. Bush at the UN. Working on contract for Newsweek, Delahaye reported on these and other events in Jenin, Kabul, Genoa and Ground Zero in New York. The images in "History" he kept for himself.

Eight 4 x 8 foot color prints from the series were presented last month at Ricco-Maresca Gallery in New York's Chelsea art district in the Paris-based photojournalist's first U.S. gallery exhibition. The selection of images has also been published as a limited-edition artist's book. The commercial aspect of the project -- the photos are reportedly priced at $15,000 each, and the book is $1,000 -- has caused a certain amount of comment in tight-knit photojournalist circles [see "Photo District News," Mar. 13, 2003].

As a photojournalist, Delahaye had been accustomed to use a compact Leica camera to record events just as they occur. For the new series, he moved from the compact Leica to the larger Technorama, a panorama camera that produces negatives that are 12 times larger than an ordinary 35mm negative. Still able to move quickly with his apparatus, however, Delahaye is able to take it all in. He shows us the world that is usually cropped by the press.

Now 41, Delahaye joined the SIPA agency in his 20s and was sent to cover the fighting in Lebanon. "In Beirut I discovered the beauty of war, the beauty of something that is deeply disturbing, but also a visual beauty that can't be found anywhere else -- it is totally unique," he said.

The experience of combat provided Delahaye with a level of complete engagement that he has sought to make the hallmark of everything that he does. "War photography gave me this high level of involvement with the impossibility of participating. . . . But it is also a process in which I must expose myself to extreme situations, where I am confronted by chaos, danger, pain and evil."

After Beirut came the conflicts in Romania, Haiti, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Delahaye returned from Rwanda with brutal images of mass burial. "After Rwanda, I changed. I'd seen madness, absolute evil, and I didn't want it to rub off on me, but it had affected me deeply none the less."

Delahaye joined the venerable Magnum photo agency when he was 32. At about the same time, he first entered the more idiosyncratic world of contemporary art with a piece called "Portraits/1." For this series of simple, Warhol-like portraits, Delahaye asked homeless and destitute people he found in the Paris Metro to pose for him in a photo booth. "They sat in this cramped booth while I was looking away; in the solitude of their experience they were confident in the machine, they knew its power of revelation. Those who have lost everything in life have nothing to hide, they are naked " The resulting images are pure intensity.

Delahaye can display an artistic approach that is unusual for a combat photojournalist. A photograph taken in 1994 in Chechnya demonstrates Delahaye's interest in framing the sometimes dangerous subjects of journalism with a more estheticized point of view. A rather menacing image of a man is reflected in a tall thin mirror that leans against a tree in the middle of the woods. A Russian soldier, the man wears a green uniform and has a shaved head. He looks out at the photographer, and the viewer. The precise situation is uncertain, though it seems clear enough that things are serious.

Like many of Delahaye's photos from this period, the image eludes easy interpretation. "In war, there is a visual disorder, something extraordinary that works on appearances. Often in a devastated city, one has the impression that the forms are released. A building is not locked up any more in its function, it is not any more this beautiful object designed by an architect. It starts living again in a kind of insane way, before final collapse."

Another of Delahaye's war photographs, Fighting the Taliban (1996), shows a cloud of dust and leaves thrown up in the air in an open space between some trees. The back of a soldier moving away is just visible; there has been some kind of explosion. "A war photographer must be able to change speeds at any time," Delahaye said, "from static to full speed. . . . It's a complex use of the body."

Other Delahaye photos from the 1990s are not so abstract. A picture taken in 1995 in Bosnia shows a pained woman lying on the ground, looking out at the photographer, her white blouse covered in blood. Her dog lies in front of her, also covered in blood and apparently lifeless. A bomb has just exploded. In the distant background, a man stands frozen. "She looked at me for six seconds," Delahaye said.

"I always tell myself that the risk is my entrance ticket," Delahaye said. "I don't wear a bulletproof vest, or drive around in an armored car. I undertake the same risks as the people I am covering. . . . The majority of photojournalists tell themselves they do this work because it is important, that if people can just see these problems in these parts of the world they will do something about them. I have never believed this. I even think that that is a con. You ask yourself if you have the right to be in such a crisis area. Is it legitimate to bend over someone who is about to die? Is it correct to photograph a dying woman?. . . I restore (the suffering) more effectively if I am able to adopt a certain detachment."

Delahaye marked the end of his work in Bosnia by producing a small book, called Mmo (Hazen, 1997), of 80 rough half-toned photos copied from the obituary pages of the daily newspaper in Sarajevo. The project is reminiscent of the work of Christian Boltanski on the Holocaust. "I wanted to symbolically close this part of my life," Delahaye said. "I wanted to forget, and I wanted others to remember for me. Mmo is. . . a small monument that fits in your pocket."

After being such an active presence in much of his photojournalistic work, Delahaye adopted a contrasting position for another group of photographs he made in the mid-'90s. For this series, called "L'Autre," which was published as a book by Phaidon in 1999, Delahaye surreptitiously photographed his fellow subway riders. The project was not unlike one that Walker Evans had done in the late 1930s, more than 50 years before. Both men tightly cropped their photographs, leaving only the faces of their subjects and a hint of the subway around them.

Curiously, Evans' photos seem filled with the romance of a chance encounter, while Delahaye's faces are shockingly modern, each visage locked in a mask. "We are very much alone in these public places," Delahaye said. "There's violence in this calm acceptance of a closed world."

For his next book, Winterreise (Phaidon, 2000), Delahaye decided to become a fly on the wall in Siberia. For four months he rode the Trans-Siberian railroad from Moscow to Vladivostok, stopping along the way and knocking on doors, asking people to allow him to come in and take pictures. Usually easing himself into a corner, Delahaye silently collected a series of real, unstaged pictures. The book, designed by Delahaye himself, unfolds like a nonfiction novel, and is a remarkable combination of restraint and brutal truth, filled with pride, madness, boredom, intoxication, sadness, fear and death

This small masterpiece shows a society caught in the death grip of a drunken stupor. "I wanted to unsettle my eyes, distort the vision," Delahaye said. "It was made easier as I was doing it in Russia, the land of fiction, grotesque and distorted reality." Winterreise is never hard to stomach or overly estheticized. Rather, it has an extraordinary stoicism that may be the distinguishing characteristic of his work.