Homeland

Last month, Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert came to Magnum Gallery in Paris to speak about his latest book, Homeland, which retraces half a century of images devoted to Belgium (available here). The retrospective brings together his work in color, as well as three portfolios of black-and-white images taken in the 1970s.

Steeped in candy-colored allure, Gruyaert’s pop-art-inspired images in Homeland exude delight, often catching a moment of coincidence, a fortuitous surprise. “I’m excited about what I see, it’s about pleasure, it’s about the sheer joy of looking,” Gruyaert says. Imbued with his love of painting, these color scenes — sometimes filled with a Hopperesque loneliness — are intensified with densely packed, captivating hues.

Finding a home next to his color images, his black-and-white portfolios pay homage to his first love, the cinema. Their composition and framing are not unlike stills from a film, as if his subjects are about to shift into the next gesture.

Born in Antwerp in 1941 into a Catholic family, Gruyaert’s father was also a photographer, acting as both a “divine authority and the middleman who introduced him to the world of images — photography and film,” writer Brice Matthieussent notes in his introduction to Homeland. ‘When I started to work in Belgium,” Gruyaert says, “[…] to me everything seemed to be gray, I shot in black and white because I didn’t see any color.”

So, at the age of 21, the fledgling photographer bid Belgium farewell for brighter horizons — Paris. There, he met Robert Delpire, William Klein, Jeanloup Sieff, the filmmakers Agnès Varda and François Truffaut, and later, Henri Cartier-Bresson. 

Gruyaert’s insatiable curiosity for far-flung locations has led him to Morocco, the United States, India, and elsewhere in Europe. And yet, his beloved Belgian homeland always has a way of beckoning him back. Little by little, color became more meaningful there for the photographer, and the “beauty of banality” emerged. Decades in the making, Homeland is a compilation in which beauty meets the banal again and again, immersing the viewer in the intensity, vibrancy, and physicality of his birthplace, from carnivals and parades to beaches and nightclubs.

A member of Magnum Photos since 1982, Gruyaert was one of the pioneers in Europe to master color, on the heels of American photographers William Eggleston and Stephen Shore. “Color is a way to sculpt what I see,” Gruyaert says, providing an apt metaphor for his kinetic experience behind the lens.

Matthieussent insists that “Harry Gruyaert surely took his best photographs in his native Flanders, images that are part of a long and venerable Belgian artistic tradition and at the same time strikingly contemporary, conveying a remarkable sense of place, a subtle feeling for colour, a unique ability, paradoxical in a photographer, for sensually suggesting the tactility of materials, and which often turn him, in a surprising way, into an abstract artist.”

On his own gravitation towards Belgium, the photographer says, “Maybe there is something that comes from even deeper, an affinity of a certain culture and mentality, that comes from maybe centuries ago.”

Copies of Homeland are now available here in the Magnum Shop.