New York is a city that lends itself to being photographed endlessly, and yet every image seems to return a different version of it. Through colors, fleeting encounters and urban glimpses, the photographer Harry Gruyaert has built over time a visual relationship with the American metropolis, observing it through his sensitivity to light and to what happens at the edges of the scene. Today, returning to photographs taken in the 1980s, the Belgian photographer reopens his archive and brings to light a series of images that have remained unpublished until now, offering a new look at a city that never stops changing.
The city as an archive of possibilities
The relationship between Gruyaert and New York has distant roots. The Belgian photographer, born in 1941, first visited the city in 1968, coming into contact with a visual universe that he would continue to explore in the following years. His gaze, also influenced by the film studies he undertook in Brussels, moves away from photography understood as mere documentation. What interests him above all are the spontaneous relationships between color, light, shapes and movement. People often become silhouettes, architectural elements turn into surfaces of color, and what happens in front of the lens seems to find an almost unexpected balance. New York, with its contradictions and its visual density, thus becomes a place in which to experiment with this research.
The rediscovery of the New York photographs is also the result of a process that has long accompanied Gruyaert’s work: going back to his own images to build new editorial projects. For his latest book dedicated to the city, published by Atelier EXB, the photographer picked up shots taken in the 1980s again, identifying images that deserved to be looked at anew. The French director Cédric Klapisch, invited to write a short text, also contributed to the publication. His proposal was to invent stories around the people portrayed, imagining their lives, their encounters and what might happen outside the frame. A device that introduces a narrative dimension into photographs that, while remaining faithful to reality, seem to leave room for multiple interpretations.
Gallery FIFTY ONE and the work of rediscovering the archive
It is precisely this possibility of continually rereading images that makes the work of Gallery FIFTY ONE central; it has represented Harry Gruyaert for about ten years. The collaboration between the photographer and the Antwerp gallery, founded in 2000 and specializing in art photography and works on paper, has developed through exhibitions, publications and projects that have helped present his work from different perspectives. As Roger Szmulewicz, the gallery’s founder, explains, Gruyaert’s archive still holds extraordinary photographs that have not received all the attention they deserve. Bringing them to light does not simply mean recovering forgotten images, but identifying new paths within a body of research that continues to reveal its richness. An approach already tried, for example, with Irish Summers, a project that brought together for the first time, in a coherent series, photographs taken in Ireland between 1983 and 1984.
In this process, the archive stops being a place in which to preserve what has been and becomes an open space, in which images can take on different meanings depending on the moment in which they are viewed. The gallery’s work moves precisely in this direction: not to establish a definitive reading of the work, but to create the conditions for it to continue to be discovered. The unpublished photographs of New York thus fit into a body of research that does not look at the past with nostalgia, but questions it in order to find new visual possibilities, showing how even an image that has long remained silent can come back to tell something unexpected.
New York at Paris Photo 2026
The journey of rediscovering Harry Gruyaert’s archive will continue at Paris Photo 2026, where Gallery FIFTY ONE will present a selection of unpublished photographs of New York at booth B13, from November 12 to 15, in the spaces of the Grand Palais. Its participation in the fair is part of an already well-established presence: in recent years the gallery has brought several selections dedicated to historical and contemporary photography to Paris, returning in 2024 as well with a presentation that included never-before-exhibited prints by Gruyaert. For this new edition, some images of the American metropolis will be offered in large format, up to 120 × 80 cm, making it possible to observe more closely the chromatic and compositional complexity of the photographer’s gaze.
Alongside Gruyaert, the booth will bring together works by Saul Leiter, Mark van den Brink, Bruno V. Roels, Stig De Block and Katrien De Blauwer, putting different approaches to the photographic language in dialogue. The presentation is also part of the 2026 edition of Paris Photo, which coincides with the bicentennial of photography and offers a comparison between historical images and contemporary practices. In this context, Gruyaert’s return to New York takes on a particular meaning: the photographs are not exhibited as testimonies of a city belonging to the past, but as images still capable of dialoguing with the present. Perhaps this is precisely the strength of a photographic archive: not to be exhausted at the moment a shot is taken, but to keep generating new readings every time it is observed again.
