Harry Gruyaert - Roots - 2012

Best Harry Gruyaert photobook so far.

In the 1970s and 1980s, encouraged by the discovery of Eggleston's work at MoMA in 1976, Harry Gruyaert (Magnum Photos) photographed Belgium in color. A superb book by one of the most famous Belgian photographers.

At the beginning of the book, and as a counterpoint, is a series of earlier black and white images.

Harry Gruyaert states: "Belgium is probably the European country that Americanized most quickly after the Second World War, hence the power of this banality, confronted with surrealism and the strength of traditions preserved despite everything, while I was working there before the turn of the century. Today, it's much less obvious; standardization is gaining ground, with a different culture of banality, less anchored in traditions. Beautiful, ugly, the banality of beauty, the beauty of ugliness. These contradictions are also mine.