« There's no preconceived idea, never any staging. I capture what I see, I search for the unique, most powerful image. ", Harry Gruyaert told us at the opening of his exhibition The Part of Things » at the BAL last June.

Indeed, the entire oeuvre of this Belgian photographer (born in Antwerp in 1941) is composed of striking images. Instantaneous images, which he sometimes spent entire days searching for, this seasoned traveler confessed. Here, he is exhibiting 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, which allows for a print to be made from a slide (a process known as positive-positive) by destroying the pigments embedded in the light-sensitive layers of the exposed and then developed paper. Distinguished by the sharpness of the image, the intensity of the colors, and the saturation of the flat areas, these rare Cibachrome prints 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.

"Becoming a seer, not a witness"

Having embraced color photography upon his arrival in New York in the early 1970s, Harry Gruyaert was indeed able to transform the ordinary into something extraordinary. Far from his native Belgium, which he found too narrow-minded, but whose "creepy" and "rather absurd" aspects he would perfectly capture in a series with a surrealist flavor, New York became the site of several revelations for him: there he discovered not only the American masters of color photography (Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore), but also Pop Art, which encouraged him "to look at banality differently, to accept a kind of ugliness in the world and to do something with it." His friendships with the new New York scene, according to Diane Dufour, curator of the exhibition, also reinforced what Antonioni's *Red Desert*, "seen a thousand times," had already instilled in him: the need to roam the world […] not to designate it or inform us about it but to sculpt it, to mold it […]. To become a seer, not a witness. »

"THE SENSE OF PLACE"

« I throw myself into things to experience this mystery, this alchemy. "The photographer himself explains, yet he rejects any apprehension."
descriptive of reality. This is, moreover, one of the paradoxes of his photography which, although devoid of any staging, possesses a very strong fictional character, whether it be the Moscow series or the Egyptian series composed of truly electrifying nocturnes…
A master of chaos (everything contributes to the composition, sometimes highly fragmented, bordering on the 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 location. This is evident in the fluorescent green of the misted storefront of an Antwerp laundromat, the red of the curtains and table on the Trans-Europ-Express 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 his images contributes to rendering the absurdity of the world, the surreal collage of life and its detached fragments. “,” Diane Dufour rightly points out. An analysis echoed by the traveling 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 previously elusive. »

“HARRY GRUYAERT – THE PART OF THINGS” THE BALL
6, Impasse de la Défense, Paris 18th
UNTIL SEPTEMBER 24, 2023
LE-BAL.FR
Above: © Harry Gruyaert, Antwerp, Belgium, 1988
Bottom: © Harry Gruyaert, Gare de Bruxelles-Midi, Belgium, 1981