Harry Gruyaert

Harry Gruyaert was one of the first European photographers to explore the creative potential of colour in the 1970s and 1980s. Influenced by American photographers as well as by cinema, his work defined new territory for colour photography: an emotive, non-narrative and boldly graphic way of perceiving the world.

In 1972, while living in London, he created the striking series TV Shots by turning the dial on a television set at random and photographing the distorted images he saw there. A later series, Made in Belgium, portrays his ambivalent relationship with his homeland in a palette of saturated tones. Born in Antwerp in 1941, and a member of Magnum Photos since 1982, he has embraced the possibilities of digital photography in his most recent work, feeling that it allows him to take more risks and to capture light in new ways. Harry Gruyaert’s images are autonomous and self-sufficient, often independent of any context or thematic logic. This volume, the first retrospective of his work, is a superb overview of his personal quest for freedom of expression and the liberation of the senses.

'The images gathered together in a new book of his photographs are full of quiet, even banal moments. But they are transformed by Gruyaert’s eye, an eye that can find beauty in a raincloud, flaking paint or a string of lightbulbs', - The Herald, Glasgow