Harry Gruyaert: Between Worlds
A master of color-saturated atmospheres, Harry Gruyaert has roamed the world searching for the perfect light for more than forty years. His intuitive and physical relationship to places immerses the spectator in a world that borrows from the cinematic universe and from that of the painter.
“A good photo is a photo that says a lot of things about the place and the moment it was taken,” says Gruyaert.
Space—its complexity, the perception that we have of it, its plasticity—is a major component of Gruyaert’s images, as if the duality between color and spatiality was dissolving in order to create a work where the only thing that matters is the pleasure of immersion.
Between Worlds dissolves the boundaries between exterior and interior spaces, a closed world and one that is open to elsewhere. From shops, cafés, subway platforms, and hotel rooms in Europe, the Middle East, the United States, and Africa from the1970s to today, Gruyaert deploys the very essence of visual writing:a luminous alchemy suspended in time. A collection of seventy-five images that connect one realm with the next, this volume shows that beyond the marvelous colorist that he is, Gruyaert’s images also depict a photographer’s vision of the world.
About the Author
Born in Belgium in 1941, Harry Gruyaert studied photography and film-making. He made a few films as director of photography for Flemish television before turning to color photographs in his adopted Paris in the early 1960s.
By the end of the 1970s he had traveled to the United States, India, Egypt, Japan and Morocco. The latter was a revelation to Gruyaert whose images of the country were later published in two different books.
In the early 1970s, while he was living in London, he worked on a series of color television screen shots later to become the TV Shots now part of the Centre Pompidou collections. Around the same period he also photographed his homeland and produced two books, Made in Belgium and Roots.
In 1982, he joined Magnum Photos. Among other importants works, the two editions of Rivages (Edges), published in 2003 and 2008, are the testimony of how Gruyaert likes to work in different environments, with contrasting lights and colors. He had a retrospective of his work in Paris in 2015 and is currently working on a major show due to open at the FOMU in Antwerp in 2018. He is currently based in Paris.
