Seeing the World in Colour

From his early childhood, Harry Gruyaert knew that he would one day become a photographer. He had owned a camera from a young age and used it to explore his surroundings. But he found his home country of Belgium far too small and grey, especially after visiting the world exhibition in Brussels in 1958. Gruyaert wanted to travel and discover the world. His father did not like the idea at the time, as he worked a great deal with photographers and did not consider it to be a serious profession. But Harry Gruyaert did not let himself be deterred from following his dream, and devoted his career to photography.

His travels took him first to Paris, where he got to know masters of his art such as William Klein and Agnes Varda. He quickly recognized that technical skills mattered less when it came to creating a significant work of art than personality and passion. For Gruyaert, his first visit to Marocco was a revelation. The connection between light and colour, people and landscape he found there, as well as the culture that seemed to him full of mysteries, made him fall in love with the country, and he returned there again and again to capture it with his camera. The strong colours that Gruyaert had so sorely missed in his home country became the central element in creating his photos from then on. His eye never seeks the spectacular, but his work is characterized above all by everyday scenes: a traffic junction, an airport terminal, a petrol station or an industrial plant. By allowing colour, light and shade to unfold when composing his pictures, he elicits from these places a kind of poetic magic. His pictures do not tell stories, but reveal a world of spaces, textures and colours. As a result, they often seem closer to painting than to photography, such as the picnic scene in the Extremadura region of Spain with its dancing light reflections through broken shadow – much like an Impressionist painting – that focuses on the atmospheric effect of the place.

Although his longing to see faraway places took him to many remote, exotic locations, Gruyaert frequently returned to Belgium, where he went exploring. Here, in his home country that he had considered so desolate in younger years, he found an unexpected beauty through photography.