{"id":12049,"date":"2014-01-13T13:20:11","date_gmt":"2014-01-13T12:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/?p=12049"},"modified":"2014-01-13T13:20:11","modified_gmt":"2014-01-13T12:20:11","slug":"harry-gruyaerts-daughters-in-black-and-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/de\/article\/harry-gruyaerts-daughters-in-black-and-white\/","title":{"rendered":"Harry Gruyaert's daughters in black and white"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" Harry Gruyaert, Saskia & Marieke, 1986 – 2008 Copyright Harry Gruyaert \/ Magnum Photos<\/p>\n

Mannheim, Ludwigshafen and Heidelberg may seem unlikely places to hold an international photo festival, but it was here that agency giant Magnum Photos installed the \u201cGrenzg\u00e4nge. Magnum: Trans-Territories\u201d exhibition for the celebration of FotoFestival\u2019s 10th anniversary. There, Sleek met with Magnum photographer Harry Gruyaert to talk about his family, the importance of black and white, and the future of documentary practice.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sleek: Can you tell us about your project at FotoFestival?
<\/strong>Harry Gruyaert: Curator Andr\u00e9a Holzherr asked me to think about \u201cFamily\u201d and that she wanted my work to go into the \u201cNo Place Like Home \/ Zuhause\u201d part of the show. I already had this project that was not completely finished, where I had photographed my children from birth until they were twentysomething. At the same time I was photographing my children, I also made 25 hours of video. It\u2019s quite different to my other work as this is in black and white, and I\u2019m very much a colour photographer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What made you want to turn your family photos into a realised photography project?<\/strong> Because you find them very interesting and you love them. I started and then I just kept on going [laughs]. Photography \u2013 it\u2019s more or less the only thing I\u2019m good at.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Do you see this work as a family album?<\/strong> For me it is an experience. It was very important for me to do, and I did it. And you know, I thought it would be good for [my daughters] as well. I think what is nice about this project is that it\u2019s not just about my own family, it\u2019s about growing up, from birth. You see the people changing, quite quickly, and that is something which is universal. It\u2019s one of a time.<\/p>\n

Were your daughters embarrassed by their dad photographing them all the time?<\/strong> Not really embarrassed, but I think they will probably like it much more in 20 years than they do now. It\u2019s like a present for them as well. I\u2019m not a conceptual artist, there is no concept to my work, I just relate to things that are in my life, to what I like and to what I see. It is important to me to take pictures.<\/p>\n

Why did you decide to photograph your daughters in black and white?<\/strong> Black and white to me is much more simple, it is not as complex. If I do colour I have to think about the light, how people are dressed, the background, all kinds of things. In black and white you go more directly to the subjects, and in this case it happened to be my daughters, so I decided to photograph them in black and white. Like I said, it\u2019s very rare for me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Is this the first project you have shot in black and white?\u00a0<\/strong> When I was working in Belgium in the beginning and me being very much a colour photographer, I didn\u2019t see any colour in that country. It\u2019s a black and white country. I was living in Paris but had a complex relationship to my home country, very much related to the Catholic religion and so on. So I really had to do something about how I felt about the country, and in a way it was more of a therapy to me. So, in the beginning I was shooting black and white and then I began to see colour in a\u00a0different way. Kind of the banality of certain things. I think these two projects, the Belgium project and the one of my children, will be the only two things that I will shoot in black and white.<\/p>\n

Do you find yourself looking at things differently when shooting black and white to colour?<\/strong> Oh yes, of course. If you do colour then the colour has to be the most important thing. Too many people, even in Magnum, in my opinion, are shooting colour just because they feel like they have to. But they are better in black and white and it\u2019s not really their thing. I think there are very few real colour photographers.<\/p>\n

How do you think documentary photography has changed?<\/strong> People don\u2019t look at things anymore, they just pull out their phone and make a picture with it. It\u2019s amazing. For us to look at something and to be interested in something, that has sort of gone. Too many photographers knew what magazines wanted and because of that, they lost their personality.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Is making the work personal to you something that is important to you?\u00a0<\/strong> I hope not just for me, but for the audience. And also for artists in general. If I can\u2019t communicate with the person in the image, then there is no personality behind it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

www.magnumphotos.com<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Taken from Sleek 40 “Man\/Boy”<\/strong><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Harry Gruyaert, Saskia & Marieke, 1986 – 2008 Copyright Harry Gruyaert \/ Magnum Photos Mannheim, Ludwigshafen and Heidelberg may seem unlikely places to hold an international photo festival, but it was here that agency giant Magnum Photos installed the \u201cGrenzg\u00e4nge. Magnum: Trans-Territories\u201d exhibition for the celebration of FotoFestival\u2019s 10th anniversary. There, Sleek met with Magnum…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12051,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1151,1152,912,913,914,917,918,919,154,1153],"class_list":["post-12049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-documentary-photography","tag-family","tag-fotofestival","tag-harry-gruyaert","tag-heidelberg","tag-ludwigshafen","tag-magnum-photos","tag-mannheim","tag-photography","tag-youth"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"\nHarry Gruyaert's daughters in black and white Harry Gruyaert's daughters in black and white<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/de\/article\/harry-gruyaerts-daughters-in-black-and-white\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"de_DE\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Harry Gruyaert's daughters in black and white Harry Gruyaert's daughters in black and white\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Harry Gruyaert, Saskia & Marieke, 1986 – 2008 Copyright Harry Gruyaert \/ Magnum Photos Mannheim, Ludwigshafen and Heidelberg may seem unlikely places to hold an international photo festival, but it was here that agency giant Magnum Photos installed the \u201cGrenzg\u00e4nge. 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