Harry Gruyaert’s vintage, kaleidoscopic scenes of New York

In 1968, Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert received an offer he could not refuse: a chance to photograph on the set of François Reichenbach’s new film set in New York City. He made the journey by boat and remembers seeing the Statue of Liberty as it sailed into the harbour.

Gruyaert stayed with dancer Trisha Brown at her downtown loft back when Soho was awash with abandoned industrial buildings with crumbling facades. Brown’s building, 80 Wooster Street, was one of the neighbourhood’s first artists’ co-op, home to Fluxus Art movement founder George Maciunas and avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who opened Cinematheque I on the ground floor to screen experimental films. It was a sign of things to come. 

“When I arrived in Soho, there were no restaurants, no galleries, no nothing. To go to a lively place, you had to go up to Washington Square,” Gruyaert says. That suited him just fine. New York’s chaotic energy was overwhelming and intoxicating in equal parts, standing in radical contrast to the dull grey of Belgium. He took to the streets, photographing the city with fresh eyes, crafting kaleidoscopic images of daily life on luminous Kodachrome film. 

• Read next: In Photos: A decade growing up in pre-gentrification Lower East Side

On that same visit, Gruyaert discovered Pop Art, the quintessentially American meditation on mass culture that blurred the boundaries between high and low art. ​“What interested me were people like Robert Rauschenberg who were using all kinds of elements you found on the street,” he says. ​“There was a certain vulgarity of advertising, which in Europe was not used very much in art. It gave something new and very contemporary.” 

Over the next half century, Gruyaert would return to New York, time and again, amassing an extraordinary archive of images that capture the freewheeling spirit of city life. With the publication of Harry Gruyaert: New York (Thames & Hudson), Gruyaert brings the city to us. The large-format book weaves together the photographer’s hypnotic scenes with fictional vignettes by filmmaker Cédric Klapisch. 

“Flicking through the pages of this book gives you the same feeling you’d get walking down a New York street,” Klapisch writes. ​“You’re not following a thread of logic, but you can feel an effervescence, a commotion, a frenetic fusion of people, signs, street furniture, advertising, and cars…. When I look at [Harry’s] photos, I immediately see life. I often find myself wondering who these people are that I’m looking at; they turn into characters in a potential movie.”

• Read next: When the Chelsea Hotel was New York’s countercultural epicentre

Gruyaert, who joined Magnum Photos in 1982, does not consider himself a journalist and had given little thought to people in his pictures until reading Klapisch’s vivid portraits of their inner lives. For Gruyaert, people are but one element of street, rather than the central focus of his work. Drawing inspiration from Magnum Photos co-founder, Henri Cartier-Bresson, he explains, ​“The genius of [his work] is that it is not only well composed, but that it says a lot of things about the place and the time it was shot, so that the different layers gives certain depth to the photographs.” 

It is this sense of place that forms the heart and soul of Gruyaert’s work, whether walking the streets of New York, Paris, Antwerp, Moscow, Mumbai, Zanzibar, and Tokyo. Taken together, they can be seen in the new exhibition, Harry Gruyaert: A Sense of Place, during Les Rencontres d’Arles.

Harry Gruyaert: A Sense of Place is on view July 6 – October 4, 2026, at Chapelle Saint-Martin du Méjan during Les Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, France.

Harry Gruyaert: New York is published by Thames & Hudson.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

Buy your copy of Huck 83 here.

Enjoyed this article? Follow Huck on Instagram for more from the cutting edge of sport, music and counterculture.

Support stories like this by becoming a member of Club Huck.