HARRY GRUYAERT
Harry Gruyaert, born in Antwerp (Belgium) in 1941, studied at the School of Film and Photography in Brussels from 1959 to 1962. Then he became a photographer in Paris, while working as a freelance director of photography for Flemish television between 1963 and 1967.
In 1969, he made the first of many trips to Morocco.From 1970 to 1972 he lived in London. This is an opportunity for unprecedented visual experiments: he decided to “cover” the Munich Olympics of 1972 and the first Apollo flights, on a broken TV screen he has at its disposal, by manipulating the colors. Between 1973 and 1980, he began a long essay on Belgium first in black and white and then in color.
Harry Gruyaert joined Magnum Photos in 1981 and continues many trips including Asia, USA, Middle East and Russia. In the 2000s Harry Gruyaert abandoned film to digital photography.
Very concerned about the quality of prints made previously in Cibachrome and sometimes dye transfer, he experimented early in the inkjet printing. Better suited to revealing the rich shades found in his films, digital print opens new possibilities for his work, bringing it one step closer to his original intention, namely to give color the means to assert its true existence.
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