synopsis
Diving into the image, dissolving the borders between exterior and interior spaces, a closed world or on the contrary open to the elsewhere: Between Worlds offers a sensory immersion. Regardless of the location (shops, stations, cafes, subways, hotel rooms, shopping malls...), the country (Europe, Middle East, Asia, United States, Africa...), the time (from the 1970s until today), the photographer deploys here the very essence of his visual writing: a luminous alchemy in suspended time. Where are we? It doesn't matter, only the delight of getting lost reigns.
By following this common thread, the book offers a transversal vision of the work of Harry Gruyaert which borrows both from the world of cinema and that of painting. "A good photo is a photo that says a lot about the place and the time when it was taken, (...) I frame a certain number of elements which are as many fragments, transparencies that are superimposed like layers, and which make my photos, indeed, reflect both the spirit of the place and the space-time.” says the photographer. A text (in French) by David Campany examines the approach and the singular positioning of the photographer who is located “in the space of the threshold (where) we are in balance, neither inside nor outside, present but in neither of the two places”.
technical information
Publisher : Editions Xavier Barral
2022
144 pages
75 colour photographs
hardcover
dimensions : 29 x 23 cm
language : french
2022
144 pages
75 colour photographs
hardcover
dimensions : 29 x 23 cm
language : french
about Harry Gruyaert
Photographer born in Antwerp in 1941, Harry Gruyaert is one of the pioneers of color photography, just like the great Americans he saw and loved very early on, Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston and Stephen Shore. Far from his native Belgium, which was too narrow, the New York of the early 1970s exposed him to Pop Art and "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 (Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Nonas) reinforced what Antonioni's Red Desert, "seen a thousand times", had already instilled in him: the need to survey the world, to throw oneself into it avidly, not to designate it or inform us about it but to sculpt it, to model it. To transcribe one's perception of things and not the things themselves. To become a seer, not a witness.
Harry Gruyaert spoke of this physical struggle, this hand-to-hand combat with things and beings: "I throw myself into things to experience this mystery, this alchemy: things attract me and I attract things." In the bandwidth of life, when everything slips away and escapes and for "everything to fall into place," one must be both more there and less there, forget oneself in order to grasp the matter, the texture, everything that makes up the here and now; submit, while cultivating the prescience of it, to an instinctive ordering of shapes, colors, symbols, lights, patterns.
source : Diane Dufour
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more information
book in my collection
Publisher : Editions Xavier Barral
2022 (1st edition)
2022 (1st edition)