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India. By Harry Gruyaert.
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Photographs by Harry Gruyaert
Thames & Hudson, London, UK, 2021. 224 pp., 11¾x9½x1".
The prolific Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert recently turned 80. Whereas most octogenarians take their foot off the gas pedal in later years, Gruyaert shows no signs of slowing down. His pace of book production has been prodigious of late. He’s published no less than five since 2015 through Thames & Hudson in London. All have been retrospectives of a sort, sifting through Kodachrome files to carve out a slice of his multi-decade career, focused around a place or theme.
The most recent book is India. Gruyaert first traveled to the country in 1976, and he’s made a dozen return trips since, both alone and with family, shooting thousands of photos. After twelve expeditions, one would expect a visitor to develop some bearings. But India defies easy comprehension. Indeed, its inscrutability is one facet which has continually drawn him back. “Today I realize I don’t know anything about India,” Gruyaert writes calmly in the new monograph. “As soon as you think you’ve understood something, an event occurs that makes you reconsider.”
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For a certain type of photographer, such unsettled terrain is just the recipe for good pictures. Gruyaert shoots a style of street work which relies on chance and movement. He first stuck a toe in the Indian waters with a 200mm telephoto, compressing street scenes from a safe distance. When that lens was stolen (fortuitously, as it turned out) he switched to a normal one, got closer, and then plunged into the deep. There are some early examples of his telephoto phase in the book but much of the contents fall into the second camp. For these, Gruyaert immersed himself thoroughly into the streets, shooting at relatively close range.
“India is bewildering,” he writes. “It takes you off-guard and makes you lose your bearings.” His photos support the claim. Their general effect is in-your-face. Occasionally they veer into outright disorientation, combining color swatches, limbs, walls, and signs, and autos into chock-full frames which require some effort to disentangle. The deep umbra of Kodachrome and Gruyaert’s timing — he favors twilight outings — also play a role, working symbiotically toward a broody palette that feels continually underexposed, and visually weighted. In the hands of a less talented photographer, this dimness might be detrimental. For Gruyaert it operates more like mood lighting, allowing faces and figures to pop from the shadows, while less important material recedes.
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Fans of Gruyaert will recognize a few familiar classics. His stellar shot from Jaipur 1976 is here, for example, magically silhouetting a bird over a busy pedestrian causeway. His jigsaw chiaroscuro from Trivandrum, Kerala, 1989 is included as well. Collaging snips of Lenin, police, bikes, and background murals into a cohesive frame is a delicate task. Just ask Alex Webb or Raghubir Singh. Gruyaert famous photo makes it look easy. That said, the well-known images here are outnumbered by a huge raft of unseen or under-publicized work. He has done a deep dive into the archives for this book, and come back with dozens of newly minted treasures.
The book includes 125 photographs in total, spanning thirty-two years. They are presented without captions (a rear index adds that info) and organized into small groupings by date, place, and style. These are ordered in turn into broad chapters labeled by category: Invitation, Rivers, Streets, Street, Illusion. Each is marked with a title and an entertaining excerpt from Jean-Claude Carriere’s Dictionnaire amoureux de l’inde, a 1981 impressionist travelog. But with the exception of Rivers (subtitled Varanasi, and focused tightly on that city), the chapters are fairly amorphous and unrestrained. For myself, and for most readers I suspect, this structure is somewhat lost to the mix. Gruyaert’s pictures seem more about being out in the world than conceptual framework, and are probably best enjoyed as such.
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Such a book might have been published without incident as recently as last decade. But in 2021 notions of identity, representation, and inclusion are in rapid flux, and this book arrives amid shifting sands. The trope of Western photographers exoticizing less developed corners of the world leaves a bad taste in some mouths, and Gruyaert’s Magnum (where he has been since 1982) is dead-center in the mix. He finds himself there one of a small white male Magnum army tromping through post-war India, stretching back to the founder Henri Cartier-Bresson, and continuing through Werner Bischof, Steve McCurry, Carl De Keyzer, Max Pinckers, and others.
Whether the fruits of their labors are celebrated or critiqued as a colonial treasure hunt will depend on one’s point of view. Personally, I’d like to have my cake and eat it too. White patriarchy is a systematic disease, surely as real and foreboding as anything in these pictures. But Gruyaert’s talent is equally authentic. His ability to compose on the fly puts him in very rare company — right up there with Raghubir Singh and Raghu Rai — and his pictures, whether of India or elsewhere, deserve attention, accolades, and future books.
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Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.