Harry Gruyaert: Between Worlds

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These images ask not so much for our emotional response as our participation with a multifaceted narrative that is not contained within any one layer. The artwork here reflects both the cultural and musical depth of Cuba as well as the political influence of revolutionary communism.

There is so much going on in all these images and the result is not confusion as much as a nuanced and sophisticated complexity. It is impossible, looking at this picture, to confidently place where everything in the image is in relationship to each other. A collection of seventy-five images that connect one realm with the next, this volume shows that beyond the marvelous colorist that he is, Gruyaert’s images also depict a photographer’s vision of the world. In his new book Between Worlds, the artist assembles his archives to deliver the essence of his visual writing: a luminous alchemy at the service of immersion in the image. Over the past century, Cuban music has produced a seemingly endless variety of styles―rumba, mambo, son, salsa―at a dizzyingly fast rate.Through the play of transparency and the mise en abyme of his images, Harry Gruyaert tells in Between Worlds the illusion of the world.

But the idea of holding multiple levels of now as being simultaneously present is fascinating and maddening and finally deeply rewarding in a way that is impossible to reduce to a single topic or thesis statement. Between them is another window looking to a subway platform on the far side where two nuns talk to a woman and a young boy.Clark addresses this strangeness head-on, examining the art of Pissarro, Matisse and others in relation to it. Renato Cisneros digs into his own family history to understand and demystify the figure of ‘El Gaucho’: the controversial Secretary during the regime of Francisco Morales Bermúdez and, shortly after, the country’s Minister of War. Other images range from New York City to Israel to Belgium to Paris to Tokyo, Istanbul, Madrid, the Dominican Republic, Tunis. His powers of persuasion clearly exceeded those of Colonel Baker, who seemed the personification of Victorian solidity until that embarrassing incident in the sealed railway compartment, where he failed to entice Miss Dickinson to join in his bit of fun, and afterwards had to try and explain his conduct to the High Court, with the whole nation hanging on his every word. Between Worlds, Gruyaert’s new book, is a deeply wonderful new collection of images taken throughout his career.