TV SHOTS: OLYMPICS 1972

Harry Gruyaert

07/09/2024

26/10/2024

Gallery FIFTY ONE TOO

To celebrate the Olympics taking place in Paris this year, we are pleased to present an amazing series by Harry Gruyaert of the 1972 Olympics.

Harry Gruyaert drew inspiration from the cathode ray tube televisions that dominated the 1970s. He captured distorted images broadcast directly into living rooms, ranging from popular shows like the British soap “Coronation Street” to the harrowing BBC coverage of the Munich Olympics.

Gruyaert’s abstract and experimental photography serves as both a parody of current affairs photojournalism and a pop-art exploration of everyday life. His works document how millions experienced significant global events through their televisions. When first exhibited in 1974, these pieces sparked controversy for their irreverent take on television culture and their bold challenge to press photography norms.

Reflecting on his work, Gruyaert said, “When I was living in London in the early 70s, there was a crazy television set in my house. By playing around with the antenna and tweaking the controls, I could suddenly obtain fascinating colors. This led me to spend a couple of months following the latest news, from the first Apollo flights to the Munich Olympic Games, as well as American and English TV series and ads. It made me see the world differently and question the growing influence of television.”

“In those days, VCRs didn’t yet exist, and I couldn’t freeze frames or rewind. I was face to face with current events, camera in hand, sometimes very close to the screen to frame things differently. It felt similar to street photography, where a good image is a small miracle that arises when you’re receptive and concentrated. With more advanced technology, the images might not have been as fresh, but merely the result of a conceptual exercise.”

“Discovering Pop Art in New York at the end of the 60s made me realize that our consumer society could be viewed with both insight and humor. I admired artists like Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, and Nam June Paik. I became a kind of bedroom reporter confronted with the ‘society of spectacle,’ seeing the world’s terrible reality through a screen.”

In 1974, Yves Bourde wrote in Le Monde, “The machine, sabotaged by flamboyant disrespect, is put back in its place, and its message becomes absurd and alarming.” Gruyaert’s work continues to resonate, challenging viewers to reflect on the pervasive impact of television on our perception of reality.

Harry Gruyaert

Originally dreaming of becoming a film director, Harry Gruyaert studied at the School of Film and Photography in Brussels from 1959 to 1962. Shortly after he left Belgium at the age of 21, fleeing the strict catholic environment in which he was raised. Gruyaert travelled extensively across Europe, North Africa, Asia and the United States and lived in cities with a vibrant film and photography scene like Paris and London. During his first trip to New York in 1968, he discovered Pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg. This encounter made him appreciate the creative potential of colour and encouraged him to search for beauty in everyday elements for the rest of his career. Around the same time Gruyaert befriended the American artists Richard Nonas and Gordon Matta-Clark and photographed their work. Further inspired by the visual impulses on his first trip to Morocco in 1969, he decided in the second half of the 1970s as one of the first photographers in Europe to commit himself entirely to colour photography.

Gruyaert’s cinematographic background instilled in him an aesthetic conception of photography. Rather than telling stories or documenting the world through his lens, he searches for beauty in everyday elements. His images are simply snapshots of magical moments in which different visual elements, primarily colour, form, light and movement, spontaneously come together in front of his lens.

Colour

In his search for strong graphical images, Gruyaert focuses his camera on objects as much as on people, who are often reduced to silhouettes or rendered to plain colour fields. Unsurprisingly the countries he photographs are mostly identified by means of the subtle differences in colour palette and light, inherent to the local atmosphere, culture and climate, more than by the depicted subjects or scenes.

Among his most well-known series are ‘Rivages/Edges’, featuring coastal views from around the world, that Gruyaert photographed out of a fascination for the rapidly changing light in these places. In the early 1970s, while he was living in London, Gruyaert worked on a series of colour television screen shots later to become the ‘TV Shots’ and now part of the Centre Pompidou collection. Around that time he regularly returned to his home country Belgium. This resulted in the series ‘Roots’, that perfectly reflects the Belgian Zeitgeist of the 1970s and 1980s.