Still Foreign
New York has been photographed so relentlessly that it has become a genre unto itself. Every decade produces its own version of the city, refracted through a different set of eyes. For Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert, that relationship has endured for more than fifty years, resulting in a body of work that feels less like a portrait of New York and more like an ongoing attempt to decipher it.
First visiting the city in 1968, Gruyaert arrived as an outsider and, in many ways, remained one. His photographs resist the mythology that so often surrounds New York. There are no grand declarations, no romanticised narratives. Instead, he focuses on fragments: a liquor store glowing beneath fluorescent light, a passerby caught between shadows, a collision of colour across a city block. The extraordinary is found within the ordinary.
Colour sits at the centre of Gruyaert's practice. Working extensively with Kodachrome throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he embraced the medium's saturated reds, deep blues and luminous yellows. The result is a New York that feels both familiar and heightened, where sunlight bounces from taxi cabs, neon signage bleeds into the street and entire compositions appear constructed from colour alone.
More than fifty years after his first visit, Gruyaert remains captivated by New York without ever seeming fully seduced by it. His photographs maintain a quiet distance, observing the city rather than attempting to explain it. Across decades of change, his gaze remains remarkably consistent, drawn to fleeting moments where colour, light and chance briefly align. The result is a body of work that feels less like a portrait of New York and more like a study of its contradictions, revealing a city that remains as elusive as it is familiar.
