" There are no ideas, no staging. I capture what I see, looking for the single, strongest image ", Harry Gruyaert told us at the opening of his exhibition " La Part des choses " at the BAL last June.

In fact, the entire oeuvre of this Belgian photographer (born in Antwerp in 1941) is made up of striking images. Instantaneous images he could spend days searching for," confessed this great traveller, who is exhibiting here for the first time 80 prints made between 1974 and 1996 using the Cibachrome process - a process invented in 1933 by a Hungarian chemist, Bela Gaspar, and commercialized in 1963, enabling a print to be obtained from a slide (the so-called positive-positive process) by destroying the pigments incorporated in the sensitive layers of the paper exposed and then developed. Distinguished by the sharpness of their images, the intensity of their colors and the saturation of their solids, these rare Cibachromes reveal the full power of the photographer's eye and, in particular, his incredible ability to render materials, textures and shadows, his art of making things visible and magnifying them through color.

"TO BE A SEER, NOT A WITNESS

Converted to color as soon as he moved to New York in the early 1970s, it was through color that Harry Gruyaert succeeded in making the ordinary extraordinary. Far from his native Belgium, which was too narrow for his taste, but whose "grating" and "rather Ubuesque" side he captured perfectly in a series with a surrealist flavour, New York was the scene of several revelations for him: not only did he discover the American masters of color photography (Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston and Stephen Shore), but also pop art, which encouraged him "to look differently at banality, to accept a kind of ugliness in the world and do something with it". It was also his friendships with the new New York scene that, according to exhibition curator Diane Dufour, reinforced what Antonioni's The Red Desert, "seen a thousand times", had already instilled in him: " the need to survey the world [...] not to point it out or inform us about it, but to sculpt it, shape it [...]. To become a seer, not a witness.

"THE SENSE OF PLACE

" I throw myself into things to experience this mystery, this alchemy ", explains the photographer himself, yet he rejects any
descriptive apprehension of reality. This is one of the paradoxes of his photography, which, although devoid of any staging, has a strong fictional character, whether in the Moscow series or the Egyptian series of electrifying nocturnes...
A master of chaos (everything contributes to the composition, which is sometimes highly fragmented, at the very edge of the frame...), Harry Gruyaert seeks not only to depict, like his great masters Bergman or Antonioni, "solitude in the urban landscape", but also, and above all, the palette of each place, what he calls "the sense of place", the spirit of the place. For example, the neon green of a foggy Antwerp laundromat, the red of the curtains and the Trans-Europ-Express table where a sleeping man lies, or the blue, yellow and marshmallow pink of a "colorful" sidewalk in County Kerry, Ireland...
" Isolated trajectories, disjointed spaces, bodies on the periphery - everything in her images contributes to rendering the absurdity of the world, the surreal collage of life and its detached pieces ", rightly notes Diane Dufour. An analysis echoed by the travel photographer's own words: " Reality resembles a Picasso collage whose elements were not meant to be put together, but which, suddenly juxtaposed, signify and say something that was elusive before. "

" HARRY GRUYAERT - LA PART DES CHOSES " LE BAL
6, IMPASSE DE LA DÉFENSE, PARIS 18E
TILL SEPTEMBER 24, 2023
LE-BAL.FR
Top: © Harry Gruyaert, Anvers, Belgium, 1988
Bottom: © Harry Gruyaert, Gare de Bruxelles-Midi, Belgium, 1981