A World in Color: Belgium, Behind the Spectacle

In the third chapter of A World in Color, we continue to revisit Europe’s past, unearthing unseen images from Magnum’s color library archive held in Paris. In partnership with Fujifilm and MPP (Heritage and Photography Library of Paris), the Magnum teams continue to digitize thousands of archived slides which have never been revealed to the public until now. 

Following image reveals from Czechia and Italy, A World in Color turns the spotlight on Belgium. This selection, ranging from 1957-2012, takes us behind the spectacle of Belgium’s festivals and into the corners of its public spheres, featuring Harry Gruyaert, René Burri, Leonard Freed, and more. 

In 1958, 16-year-old Gruyaert visited the World’s Fair in Brussels, where he took his first photos and dreamed of traveling the world. This selection’s timeline begins just a year before, with Freed’s rare, early color photographs, and continues to trace over half a century of color photography.

Belgium has been a center of gravity in Harry Gruyaert’s work since the 1970s. Born in Antwerp in 1941, Gruyaert knew by the time he was a teenager that he wanted to be a photographer, although this was met with reluctance from his father. “I had to fight for it,” Gruyaert said. He left Belgium for Paris in 1962, and it would be another decade until he probed deeper into his “complicated relationship” with his homeland.

In 1968, he discovered pop art in New York City, a revelation that led him to appreciate “the beauty of a certain banality, of a certain vulgarity,” he said in a Paris Photo interview. He found that this embrace of the absurd was also alive in his Belgian heritage — in the surrealism of Magritte, for instance. Back in Belgium in the 1970s, Gruyaert photographed in black and white for two years — “I didn’t see any color,” he said. Yet, influenced by his experience in America, he gradually dropped black and white almost entirely. At a time when color was primarily the domain of the press, Gruyaert produced his own pioneering body of work in color.

“It’s a physical thing, color,” he told Paris Photo, “I find black and white more abstract, more intellectual somehow.” Gruyaert’s image above captures an Italian cultural center — now an apartment building — on the slope of rue Pierreuse in Liège, with his signature use of imbued color, contrast, and cinematic composition.

Gruyaert’s lucid palettes became a consistent pulse in his photographs. Yet despite his main influences being film — Antonioni and Bergman, for instance — and painting — Bruegel, Bonnard, Matisse — the pulse is his own. He notes that when he first picked up a camera, photographic influences were sparse: photobooks barely existed and weren’t easily accessible. When he met William Klein in 1962 in Paris, and later Jeanloup Sieff, he realized that the photographers resembled their own images. “I started to see where the photos came from,” he told France Culture. It was a significant lesson for Gruyaert: “What counts is your personality,” he learned. 

The image revealed above from a German-inspired Oktoberfeesten in Wieze seizes a moment in which color, light, and people converge. Guyaert’s images, like this one, transmit a sense of mystery that is both captivating and unpinnable. The black arrow pointing to nothing throws the image intriguingly off kilter. 

“I’m not a photographer who wants to explain things,” he notes. Rather, “it’s a question of attraction. […] We see a place where we like the architecture, we like the light that’s moving, and people passing by.” Then suddenly, everything aligns. “That’s the miracle I’m looking for,” he says.

These archived images also contribute to Gruyaert’s extensive work on Belgium’s festive traditions, which can be seen in his three books on the country: Roots, Made in Belgium, and most recently, Homeland. Here, Gruyaert documents a religious occasion: the Procession of the Holy Blood in Bruges. 

In this tradition dating back to 1304, participants dress in Biblical attire on Ascension Day, processing through the historic city center. Bishops carry a gilded capsule containing the relic of the Holy Blood — a cloth said to be stained with the blood of Christ. Rather than capturing the procession itself, Gruyaert was drawn to the fringes, the liminal zones where people in costume wait on the sidelines.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, famously a staunch defender of monochrome, saw something in Gruyaert’s color work that intrigued him. After seeing an exhibition of Gruyaert’s images of Morocco, Cartier-Bresson wanted to send him some of his black-and-white prints so that Gruyaert could color them in with pastels, an offer that Gruyaert kindly declined. Yet what Gruyaert believes they share is the aim to be “invisible” when photographing — as we see here — in order to translate a “sense of place,” the title of Gruyaert’s film series. 

With a sense of place inevitably comes the passage of time, adding a more abstract dimension to the loneliness associated with Gruyaert’s photography. Today, the Italian cultural center in Liège no longer exists, and the beer festival in Wieze hasn’t stayed afloat. Yet time travels both ways; Gruyaert’s connection to Belgium, he suggests, may stem from “an affinity of a certain culture, a certain mentality that comes from maybe centuries ago.” 

Unlike Gruyaert, René Burri didn’t settle on his future career at a young age. “Imagine a guy who never wanted to be a photographer,” he said, “but circumstances led more and more to it. And where did I learn it? I was a boy on my grandfather’s farm. […] There were flies there, and I started catching them. And only later on, I learned it helped me to be fast in reaching out for things.”

René Burri was primarily a black and white photographer. His wife, Clotilde Blanc Burri, explains that on assignments, he would often take the same photo in black and white and in color, leading him to proclaim: “I led a double life.” His book Impossible Reminiscences (Phaidon, 2013), published a year before his death, was the first time his color photographs appeared in print. 

The images revealed here were taken on an assignment in Brussels, where Burri photographed the overlooked corners of public spaces. “When one really manages to capture the vibration of the living, then we can talk about ‘good photography,’” he said. The energy of the capital meets Burri’s avid interest in art, sculpture and architecture. His photographic trajectory involved some of the most renowned artists of the 20th century, from Pablo Picasso —  who Burri tracked down at his hotel room in Nîmes in 1957 — to the visionary Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. 

He was interested in photographing people alongside buildings and sculptures for contrast, as in the image above, in which visitors hope for a dose of good luck at Julien Dillens’s sculpture of Everard ‘T Serclaes, a nobleman who defended Brussels in the 14th century. 

Burri also photographed The Ultimate Hallucination, a florid Art Nouveau restaurant redesigned by the 27-year-old architect Paul Hamesse in 1904. A walk through its transom paneled rooms leads to the dining area, where Burri photographed two men between a sculpture of a nude.

Burri wasn’t only an art enthusiast. He was known to have an insatiable urge to create, and he prolifically made collages (see two here), originally to appease his nerves as his plane was taking off, his wife Clotilde Blanc Burri says. His playful photograph below of the Brussels Comic Art Museum acts as a real-life montage: a visitor sits in a cut-out recreation of a plane from The Adventures of Tintin by Hergé, the pen name of Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi.

Belgium’s treasured carnival traditions, which date back to the Middle Ages, also feature in this selection from the archive. In the days leading up to Shrove Tuesday in March, Belgian streets erupt with elaborate costumes, archetypal characters, brass bands, and a patchwork of pagan, Christian, and folkloric rituals. Like Gruyaert, Leonard Freed and Richard Kalvar show us life on the edges of the spectacle.

These images reveal some of Freed’s rare color work, showing his humanist leanings from the very beginning of his career. Here, he photographed a folkloric troupe on a river near Namur. Every year since at least 1411, these Namurois performers called “échasseurs” battle on colorful stilts, attempting to knock over their opponents. 

Richard Kalvar captured a winsome crowd with a stray orange in mid-air during La Louvière’s carnival, where characters called the Gilles throw oranges into the crowd for good luck. 

Ian Berry and Erich Hartmann seized serendipitous, ephemeral moments throughout Belgium’s history and across its geography, from a rainy tourist excursion in Bruges to a boy with a scythe in the fields of Waterloo. 

These revelations from Belgium’s past revisit the country’s centuries-old festivals and transient vignettes from vastly different lenses and time periods, converging to form a “sense of place,” as Gruyaert describes. Charting the evolution of color photography represented in Magnum’s extensive archives, they also provide a glimpse into each photographer’s lifework.

Live Events

Discover these images and more at the next live FUJIKINA event in Brussels from May 24-25, 2025. The exhibition will reveal 10 new images of Belgium curated by Magnum photographer Myriam Boulos, and original slide sheets from the archive. Boulos also presents an exclusive new series of photographs commissioned for the event. Looking through the Belgium archive, Boulos was intrigued by the way people were portrayed in public spaces, particularly from a Western male perspective. Exploring the public sphere from her own lens as a woman from Lebanon, Boulos used a FUJIFILM GFX 100 RF to investigate ways in which bodies occupy space, interact, and simply exist in Brussels today. Talks by Boulos and Magnum photographers Carl De Keyzer and Bieke Depoorter are also scheduled throughout the weekend.

FUJIKINA BRUSSELS
Mechelsesteenweg 255, 1800 Vilvoorde
May 24-25, 2025
With Myriam Boulos, Carl de Keyzer and Bieke Depoorter

Book your tickets here

Read more about A World in Color here.

Follow the full series via our World in Color newsletter. Subscribe here.