Homeland

Flemish by birth, Gruyaert has long known that his native land is " a visually interesting place where things happen incongruous". The photographer's typical chromatic universe here sets the portrait of a Belgium where everyday life can change in an instant the strange. These images sometimes evoke surrealist collages, movement artistic whose Belgian representatives were fascinated by the strangeness of the reality. Sense of the grotesque, sarcasm, banality, but also emotion and a A certain tenderness is sketched out through images of carnival and processions religious, small towns bristling with brick houses... The skies are often low, the lights crystal clear, the colors saturated to tamp down the pawn in the cold atmospheres of the north. Over the course of the pages, a long travelling: the notion of time seems to be destroyed here, the photographer's objective captures the singularity of a nation, captures a daily life that unfolds like a hyperrealistic movie set. Urban lighting, storefront neon lights, glances who hide behind the wise curtains of suburban dwellings, passers-by costumed people wandering after a drunken party, train platforms plunged into mornings foggy, crazy nightclub fauna, suburban areas with dreary facades, ports that never sleep, countrysides with endless horizons, Belgium of Harry Gruyaert is a distillation of the photographer's art: extreme attention to the colors and lights that restore the fleeting character of things. counterpoint to these color photographs, four portfolios of black and white images white made in the 1970s – early history of the photographer – and reproduced on offset paper, punctuate this visual immersion of this trip to the flat country.