Harry Gruyaert – Last call

Harry Gruyaert’s work at the Magnum Photo Gallery in Paris until December 31st, 2020.

The exhibition shows a selection from his Last Call series, a collection of images made in airports around the world.

Member of Magnum Photos since 1982, Harry Gruyaert (Antwerp, 1941) is fascinated by those liminal and transitional spaces full of frustration, queues, and heavily scented duty-free retail opportunities, where the theatricality of human movement is constantly on display. Airports especially, that are, he writes, spaces “with a host of players gliding through as though they’re on a stage”. He has always loved to watch people there, with their movements, their postures, their gazes, the groups that they form and “the situations that occur in those peculiar moments when time is standing still.”

The architecture, the furniture and the colors of an airport combine to make a sort of set, with people acting a sort of performance slightly difficult to understand completely, but visually effective.

Gruyaert uses to say that the human figure is not the most important thing in his photographs, since he “was much more interested in all the elements: the decor and the lighting and all the cars; the details were as important as humans. That’s a different attitude altogether.”

Harry Gruyaert‘s embrace of color photography set him ahead of many contemporaries in Europe at a time when the medium was widely seen as most applicable to the realm of commercial and advertising photography.

The complete Last Call series has been published by Thames & Hudson in 2020.