“I never think about the people in my photos, or hardly ever,” said Harry Gruyaert recently. “It’s more a combination of things: the colours, the rhythms.” There are plenty of the latter two in Gruyaert’s new collection, New York, drawn from 50 years of images taken during visits to the metropolis. The book is awash with colours: taxi-cab yellows and peep-show reds flaring out from the grey concrete. And the rhythms are as ceaseless and frenetic as you’d expect. But almost every shot in the book has people in it, even if it’s just the silhouette of a head or a red-nailed hand draped elegantly out of a car window.
In this photograph, taken in 1985 just off Madison Avenue, we see 11 people in the frame, though the windows of the bus and the skyscrapers overhead conceal thousands more. Only one pedestrian is facing in our direction. What was the woman in blue thinking as she approached the camera-wielding Belgian on the sidewalk? According to film-maker Cédric Klapisch, who has supplied imagined captions in the book, she’s regretting her choice of raincoat: “George told me to check the weather on TV this morning. But I didn’t listen… [Now] I’m sweating like nobody’s business under this blue plastic.”
Even if Gruyaert didn’t dwell on the people in his pictures, you can see why this woman and her companion in red drew his eye. Since his first visit to New York in 1968 he has been enthralled by colour. Before that, he shot in black and white because, as he once told an interviewer, “in Belgium, everything seemed to be grey”. That first New York trip coincided with his discovery of pop art, which instilled in him not just an appreciation of bright, gaudy colours but also of everyday life as a subject for art.
Gruyaert’s New York is not a city of hushed dining rooms, gilded opera houses or high-rise apartments with skyline vistas. It’s a city viewed from street level that teems with noisy, chaotic, joyous life. Each person moving through his frames invites us to take a closer look and wonder, in this metropolis of 8.5 million people, what’s going on in your head – and your head – and yours?
Harry Gruyaert: New York is published by Thames and Hudson
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