“I’m not a photojournalist” states Belgian Magnum photographer Harry Gruyaert – “my influences come from painting and cinema.” However, his color-soaked images of Las Vegas and Los Angeles in 1981 and Moscow in 1989 cannot help but reveal the signs of the times – images published in his new book East / West.
In following his intuition, Gruyaert finds himself drawn to documenting a “banality that is extremely interesting” – vistas rendered in brilliant Kodachrome of what was then, for the inhabitants of those places, just the backdrop to everyday live, but now, for outsiders, 30 years in the future, are cinematic visions of another world. “The genius of Cartier-Bresson is not only that his work is extremely well composed, ” says Gruyaert, “but that it says a lot about the time and the place he photographed.”
