Harry Gruyaert
Born in Belgium in 1941, Harry Gruyaert grew up in a strict, traditional Catholic-Flemish family.
Since he was very young, he knew that he wanted to do film and photography. In 1962 he left for Paris as soon as he could to flee the oppressive constraints of home life. It was in Paris that he became a photographer, while working as a freelance director of photography for Flemish television between 1963 and 1967.
In New York in 1968, he discovered Pop Art and “thus saw objects of everyday life in a different way”. In the early 1970s, while he was living in London, he was fascinated by the color image of the first TV screens, another resounding influence on his way of seeing, and worked on a series of color television screen shots later to become the TV Shots series, now part of the Centre Pompidou’s collection.
Around the same period he also photographed his homeland and produced two books, Made in Belgium and Roots, with a new edition in 2018.
By the end of the 1970s Gruyaert had made significant bodies of work in North Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Europe and India, where he refused stereotypical exoticism in favor of a deeper aesthetic. “For me, photography is not only about composition and color, it has to say something about the time and the place” he has said of his work.
In 1982 he joined Magnum Photos. Among other important works, the three editions of Rivages, published in 2003, 2008 and 2018 and East/West published in 2017, are a testimony of how Gruyaert likes to work in different environments, with contrasting lights and colors. As well as many notable personal projects, Gruyaert has also worked with industrial and commercial clients including luxury brand Hermès.
Among several important exhibitions, he had a retrospective of his work in Paris in 2015 and a major show at the FOMU in Antwerp in 2018. In the summer 2023, he showed a large selection of Ciba vintage prints at Le Bal, in Paris.
Gruyaert’s works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum in Tokyo, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and Foto/Industria in Bologna and the Deutsche Börse Foundation among others and he is the recipient of several awards like the Kodak Prize (1976) and the PhotoEspana Life Achievement Award (2016).
Harry Gruyaert lives in Paris and is represented by Gallery FIFTY ONE in Antwerp.
