Between Worlds (published in 2022 by Atelier Xavier Barral / Thames & Hudson) is a thematic monograph by Belgian Magnum photographer Harry Gruyaert, edited and featuring an introductory essay by curator David Campany.
The volume brings together 75 color photographs spanning Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the US from the 1970s through the present. Each image focuses on spatial barrierssuch as shop windows, glass reflections, doorways, screens, and mirrors.
Gruyaert experiments with shooting through transparent or reflective surfaces to collapse multiple planes of depth, light levels, and color palettes into a single frame. The resulting compositions juxtapose interior tranquility with exterior street life, or warm domestic interiors against cold urban landscapes.
Known for his cinematic mastery of saturated color, Gruyaert uses these structural obstructions to complicate the viewer's perception of space, blurring the line between inside and outside, public and private.
As Campany notes in the essay, these "threshold images" act as formal metaphors for Gruyaert’s position as a traveler, a perpetual outsider passing through spaces without fully belonging to any single register of experience
Between Worlds (published in 2022 by Atelier Xavier Barral / Thames & Hudson) is a thematic monograph by Belgian Magnum photographer Harry Gruyaert, edited and featuring an introductory essay by curator David Campany.
The volume brings together 75 color photographs spanning Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the US from the 1970s through the present. Each image focuses on spatial barrierssuch as shop windows, glass reflections, doorways, screens, and mirrors.
Gruyaert experiments with shooting through transparent or reflective surfaces to collapse multiple planes of depth, light levels, and color palettes into a single frame. The resulting compositions juxtapose interior tranquility with exterior street life, or warm domestic interiors against cold urban landscapes.
Known for his cinematic mastery of saturated color, Gruyaert uses these structural obstructions to complicate the viewer's perception of space, blurring the line between inside and outside, public and private.
As Campany notes in the essay, these "threshold images" act as formal metaphors for Gruyaert’s position as a traveler, a perpetual outsider passing through spaces without fully belonging to any single register of experience