It seems a relatively simple image. A boy perched high in an olive tree reaches down to pluck fruit from a lower branch. Below, in the hazy distance, buildings, roads and walls can be made out before the landscape dissolves into the late-afternoon sky.
The photograph, taken near Nablus in the West Bank in autumn 2015, was the result of a whole week’s work by Luc Delahaye and his “models” from a local village (there is a second boy concealed behind the branches). It was during the olive harvest, a time of joy for Palestinian families shadowed by the ever-present threat of harassment from Israeli settlers.
Delahaye, who first visited the West Bank as a war photographer in the late 1980s, didn’t want to focus on conflict, he says, but was interested “to go in a moment of tension nevertheless”. From the boys, he wanted playfulness but also silence and stillness. The latter was for technical reasons – he was working with a large-format camera which requires subjects to remain still – “but it is also to help them reach an inner state, to forget that they are acting, to be conscious of the seriousness of this moment, this job.”
Delahaye insists he didn’t set out with a fixed idea in mind. Instead, he simply recorded his subjects at play so he could compose the final image later on his computer – this, like many of Delahaye’s works of the past quarter century, is stitched together from multiple photographs. But when the boy reached downwards, it struck Delahaye that “this really was the direction I wanted to go”.
The image – part of an exhibition of Delahaye’s work on show in Paris – can be read in various ways. Some viewers have told him it reminds them of photographs of lynchings in America; others see the precarity of the Palestinian people on their own land reflected in the boy’s position in the tree. For Delahaye, intriguingly, it calls to mind the tarot card of the Hanged Man. “One of the meanings of that card is to look at things differently,” he says. “You don’t have to change many things to totally revolutionise your perception.”
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Luc Delahaye: The Echo of the World is at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, until 4 January