Harry Gruyaert

Direction: Valéry Faidherbe and Harry Gruyaert
Original music: Tuur Florizoone
Colour correction: Albin Millot

For the last five decades, Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert, a member of the Magnum Photos agency, has travelled the world to capture its different atmospheres. In the American colour photography tradition, his work transcends the banality of everyday life by exploring the existential, descriptive qualities of colour.

Colour and variations in brightness are used to create highly graphical shots in a style influenced by painting. And the perfectly balanced compositions of these unstaged photographs appear to suspend time and evoke a cinematic atmosphere.

His affinity for cinema was recently underscored in his film series “A Sense of Place”. Using a slide presentation style (slide projection with a soundtrack), these short videos present series of photographs of a single region, with original music by Tuur Florizoone. This project also presented an opportunity for Harry Gruyaert to revisit a selection of his images and use digital tools to retouch the colour balance of the images produced on Kodachrome film.

NORTH, a new production for the Institut pour la photographie, consists of a sequence of over 160 photographs of the Hauts-de-France Region – rural, urban, industrial and coastal landscapes – taken between the 1980s and the present day, for commissioned and personal projects. The images are ordered according to their chromatic and formal composition, with music composed to reflect the rhythm and atmospheres of the visual sequence. An immersive experience of photography that invites us to “watch”.