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The Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert became famous for breathing originality into colour photography from “exotic” locations. His breakthrough work came on assignment in Morocco and India in the 1970s, and in Egypt in the 1980s. He subsequently travelled more widely, having been elected to the famous Magnum picture agency – among the first of its members to establish a visual language for colour rather than black and white.
Gruyaert was fascinated by the aesthetics of transit, in particular the loneliness of airport lounges. This picture, taken at Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport in 2010, is typical of the atmosphere of this work. The business traveller eating his lunch injects human life into the abstract patterning of the shadows on the lounge floor just as surely as one of David Hockney’s swimmers diving to disrupt the geometries of a California swimming pool.
Gruyaert is 78. The new collection of his airport pictures is titled Last Call, and seems to want to say as much about mortality as the mechanics of boarding lounges. “I’ve always been fascinated by places where people wait,” Gruyaert says of the project. “I love to watch their movements, their postures, their gazes, the groups they form in those peculiar moments when time is standing still…”
He thinks of waiting rooms as impromptu stage sets with a cast of players entering and exiting. These days he can hardly wait to get the formalities of passport and security over quickly so his eye can wander the underpopulated halls, in search of those angles and reflections “that make you lose your bearings and create a very strong impression of being caught between two worlds”.
Harry Gruyaert: Last Call is out now (Thames & Hudson, £29.95)
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