Signed; Harry Gruyaert - Morocco - 2023

Since his first trip in 1972, Harry Gruyaert has kept returning to Morocco, in search of the initial shock he felt: a splendid harmony between forms, colours, the everyday gestures of people and nature. From the High Atlas to the desert, from the countryside to Marrakech, Fez, Essaouira or Erfoud, Gruyaert’s images constitute imaginary theatres in which he expresses the spell that this country has exerted on him for more than 50 years. But his photographs are paradoxically also very physical. “To photograph is at the same time to seek contact and to reject it, to be the most there and the least there. In the field it is a real ‘battle’ with reality, a kind of trance to record an image or perhaps miss it all. It is in this struggle that I am at my best. “
Morocco is the expression of this particular tension, somewhere between exaltation and delight.