Luc Delahaye was born in France in 1962 and became a photojournalist in his early 20s. In the 1990s he distinguished himself for his coverage of the wars in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Chechnya, and Bosnia. Working independently or commissioned by Western news magazines, he was a member of the Magnum agency from 1994 to 2004. Delahaye was awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 1993 and 2002; World Press Photo first prizes in 1993, 1994, and 2003; the ICP Infinity Award in 2001; the Niepce Prize in 2002; and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2005.

In addition to his war coverage, Delahaye realized several documentary portrait series: Portraits/1 (1996) is a series of photo booth portraits of homeless people he encountered in the Parisian subway. Memo (1997) is a collection of portraits of war victims in Bosnia, reproduced from the obituary pages of a local newspaper. L'Autre (The Other) (1999) presents a selection of portraits of people he photographed in the subway without them being aware of it. Another series is Une Ville (A City) (2003), a social and architectural survey in a suburb of Toulouse, France.

In the winter of 1998–1999, Delahaye traveled to Russia to photograph the social consequences of the country's economic crisis. Depicting the struggles of the Russian people, this striking series, titled Winterreise (Winter Journey) was published in 2000. Through its rich colors, it reveals a transcendent narrative form of documentary photography.

Since 2001 Delahaye has dedicated himself to a large-scale photographic series of current events, traveling around the world to depict new subjects. A first selection of a dozen images, History, was published in 2003. His work is in the collections of several institutions and has been exhibited internationally, including at the National Media Museum (Bradford, England, 2004), Huis Marseille (Amsterdam, 2004), the Cleveland Museum of Art (2005), La Maison Rouge (Paris, 2005), and the Sprengel Museum (Hannover, Germany, 2006).