Edges by Harry Gruyaert (Foreword by Richard Nonas)

Description

Edges by Harry Gruyaert

Year: 2018
Format: Hardback with tipped on colour plate to front board (without jacket)
Size: 230 x 300 mm
Pages: 144 pp
Language: English
Published by: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 9780500545058

The ‘edges’ that Harry Gruyaert, a pre-eminent member of the Magnum photo agency, explores in this incredibly lush, full-colour book, are the oceans, seas and rivers where humans meet the edge and the water begins. This unusual volume, which opens from the top up, takes the reader to Israel’s Dead Sea, the Mali River in Niger, the North Sea of Iceland, South Korea and Biarritz, as Gruyaert’s sensitive photos record the subtle chromatic vibrations of the edges of the Orient and the Occident. Gruyaert opposes the hustle of the city with a pared-down, yet intense, nature. His landscapes are never empty; they are inhabited places where light, colour, objects, people and situations weave a serene, sublime tableau.

This beautifully produced photographic manifesto reveals the profoundly poetic character of Harry Gruyaert’s work, and the sensual elegance of his faultless compositions.

Mali, 1988, by Harry Gruyaert / Magnum Photos

From northern France to Morocco and India, Harry Gruyaert has spent more than forty years capturing the changing colours of beaches, coasts and shorelines all over the world. Beneath skies that may be stormy, hazy or clear, his gaze lingers on distant horizons and seeks out shifting shadows and moments of blazing light. Fifteen years after the first publication of this legendary collection, Harry Gruyaert has now added some fifty new images, exploring the endless poetic potential of the places where land and water meet.

Ostend, Belgium, 1988, by Harry Gruyaert / Magnum Photos

Seoul, South Korea, 2007, by Harry Gruyaert / Magnum Photos.

Harry Gruyaert ignores the grammar of center and edge, finds the blurred boundaries of overlapping life, the places where one thing has begun to be another thing. …… He photographs the boundaries that hover just beyond our sight too, the shadows of an actual reality too blurred, too confused, too nuanced for any language to hold. He captures it whole. He holds it. As powerful art. As heart-wrenching beauty. As the overwhelming mystery of ungrammatical silence.

– From introduction by Richard Nonas

Also by Harry Gruyaert – Irish Summer, Last Call