Las Vegas downtown motel, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States, 1982. © Harry Gruyaert Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Thames & Hudson.
“Higher emotions cannot be communicated in color,” American photographer Paul Strand claimed – revealing the power of irrational beliefs to take root in the mind and spread like a virus through those who fear to question ideology in search of the truth.
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The decision to invite Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert (b. 1941) to join Magnum Photos in 1982 caused dissent among the ranks. At that time Gruyaert had been working in color for two decades, but the powers that be “didn’t see color,” so to speak. Photography was still a fledgling medium in the art world, and those who were desperate to join the ranks revealed a powerful insecurity that fed simple-minded biases and false hierarchies designed to exclude innovative thinkers who worked outside the narrow frame of the status quo.
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Gruyaert, however, was undeterred. His commitment remained consistent throughout his remarkable career. In 1981, Geo photo editor Alice Rose George commissioned Gruyaert to photograph Las Vegas. Rather than provide his take on the tired tropes of the Strip, Gruyaert ventured off the beaten path ton the Vegas where residents lived. The result was entirely too realistic; Vegas was not the place of fantasies and spectacle – it was a world where people eked out their existence on the margins.
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Moscow, Russia, 1989. © Harry Gruyaert Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Thames & Hudson.