Harry Gruyaert

Gruyaert was born in 1941 in Antwerp, Belgium. He studied at the School for Photo and Cinema in Brussels from 1959 to 1962.^[7] He began freelance work in Paris, while working as a director of photography for Flemish television.^[7]

In 1969 Gruyaert made his first trip to Morocco.^[7] The resulting work won him the Kodak Prize in 1976^[6] and was published in the book Morocco in 1990. He travelled to India for the first time in 1976 and to Egypt in 1987.^[7]

In 1972 he photographed the Summer Olympic Games in Munich and the first Apollo flights as they were shown on a television set.^[8][9] This series, TV Shots, was first exhibited at the Delpire Gallery in 1974^[10] and later elsewhere. It was published as a book in 2007.

Gruyaert joined Magnum Photos in 1982 and became a full member in 1986.^[11]

Gruyaert was experimenting with Kodachrome colour film for his documentary work in the late 1960s, contemporary with work by Ernst Haas, William Eggleston and Joel Meyerwitz touted by US commentators as 'The New Color',^[12][13] though after that of other Americans Saul Leiter, Gordon Parks and Vivian Maier in the 1950s. With Alex Webb, he was one of the first in the Magnum agency to shoot entirely in colour when he was invited to join in 1982.^[14][2]

Wilco Versteeg, in reviewing his work in 2018 writes that;

"Harry Gruyaert’s intuitive and candid color work was not always understood in a world that looked skeptically at anything smacking of "street photography" and equated black-and-white photography with serious artistry well into the 1980s. He is now under renewed consideration as one of Europe’s most important photographers…No matter where he turns his eye, his work attests to a constant exploration of the potentialities of color in seemingly colorless urban environments.

"Gruyaert eschews anthropological pretensions. Mirroring surfaces and windows are abundant [and] attest to Gruyaert's self-subjected distance, while nonetheless situating the photographer as observer and frame-giver – the quintessential flâneur. Rather than explicating large political or societal issues through his work, he prefers to speak about the contradictions of reality through the quality of light, color, and contrast.

"Whether Gruyaert roams the streets of Antwerp, Las Vegas, Moscow, or Paris, it is not the need to document that drives him, bul his appetite for interpretation. He directs us toward the unsung joys and tragedies of realities that upon first observation seem barren and empty, but in fact are structured through colored planes and details."^[15]

• 1976: Winner, Kodak Prize.^[6]

Gruyaert's work is held in the following permanent collections:

• MAST, Foto/Industria, Bologna, Italy.^[24]
• Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, TX.^[25]
• Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.^[26]
• David Roberts collection, London.^[27]