In 1958, at the Brussels World’s Fair, a Belgian teenager trailed his camera past the Japanese pavilion, then the American one. He did not know it yet, but he had just grasped the one rule that would govern his existence: you can only tell well what you go looking for yourself. Harry Gruyaert is now 84, with two retrospectives open at the same time: one at the Camera center in Turin, the other at the chapelle Saint-Martin du Méjan in Arles, where Géraldine Lay and Cyril Delhomme have devoted “A Sense of Place” to him as part of the Rencontres.

To open the exhibition catalogue, he chose Baudelaire rather than a critical essay, a line from The Painter of Modern Life (1863) on the intoxication of “making one’s home in the crowd, in the ebb and flow, in the movement, in the fleeting and the infinite”. The word is well chosen, and it says more than any biography could. Since the 1960s, Harry Gruyaert has lived in Paris and never stopped leaving it: New York, Tokyo, Las Vegas, Moscow, Antwerp, Mumbai, Papeete, the destination hardly matters, as the artist puts it, since what counts is never the subject but the way the street arranges itself before his eyes.

Harry Gruyaert, Carnival, Antwerp, Belgium, 1992 © Courtesy of the artist and Gallery FIFTY ONE, Antwerp.

Harry Gruyaert, Waterloo Battle Commemoration, Boom, Belgium, 1988 © Courtesy of the artist and Gallery FIFTY ONE, Antwerp.

His method comes down to one image, borrowed from one of his mentors, Henri Cartier-Bresson: “draw fast and vanish”, like a pickpocket. Harry Gruyaert never asks permission. He frames, he takes, he leaves. That furtive gesture survives intact in the prints on show: an enormous red balloon, almost obscene, swallowing a stooped back whole in a street in Boom, in 1988, on the day of the Waterloo commemoration; or the three red plumed helmets of Antwerp firemen parading past a mustard-yellow car. Sometimes you can see it happening, on the street, Harry Gruyaert looking for the color before the scene, and waiting. Nothing historical here, only a street, an afternoon, a moment. The same colors recur and vary across the photographs, in every corner of the world, the same refrain, as if a red in Antwerp were worth a red in Mumbai.

Harry Gruyaert has always said as much, and repeated it in late June to Le Monde: cinema shaped him far more than photography did. Antonioni first, whose feel for urban solitude he shares: “When he films London, I’m instantly in London.” Edward Hopper next, whose obsession with city outskirts glimpsed from a train he shares too, to the point of wanting to make an entire book of it. He draws from it a line that is both warning and ars poetica: “People miss all this beauty to stare at their phones.” One to engrave in every train carriage and public square.

Painting feeds his eye just as much, and it shows in his images: the Impressionists, Matisse and Bonnard, and the Flemish masters he never left behind, Bruegel, Ensor, Spilliaert. American pop art, for its part, freed him from the black and white he associated with his native Belgium. Since then, in his work, the vulgar turns sumptuous, composing a geometry that amounts, in the end, to a jazz score.

Géraldine Lay is not fooled: behind the chromatic virtuosity lies a patient chronicle of ways of inhabiting the city, a theater in which the anonymous passerby, leaning against a wall or sitting at a café table, deserves as much attention as any event. A stubborn curiosity animates this gaze, exercised for more than fifty years across every continent.

Harry Gruyaert, Waterloo, Belgium, 1981 © Courtesy of the artist and Gallery FIFTY ONE, Antwerp.

On a table at the entrance to the chapel, a small book stands out among the scholarly monographs: Je vois rouge (“I See Red,” Hélium éditions, published in June 2026), made for children, which turns the same images into a treasure hunt. No critical text, no biography, only open questions: how many reds can you count on this page, where is that silhouette hiding, what becomes of the scene once you have finished looking at it. As if a seven-year-old could, without knowing it, apply the photographer’s own method: observe without hierarchy, linger on a detail, let the story arrive on its own. Next to the serious, glossy, expert-annotated books that accompany any self-respecting retrospective today, this one looks like a mischievous intruder. Yet it is the very same eye, brought down to a child’s height. A colorist’s handbook, really, and for every age.

You leave the chapelle du Méjan with this certainty: no one else has turned wandering into such a rigorous discipline. Harry Gruyaert explains nothing, barely theorizes, he simply arranges the world his own way, one frame at a time. His way of walking through the real? “Fall in love, and go.”

“A Sense of Place” is on view at the chapelle Saint-Martin du Méjan, from July 6 to October 4, 2026 as part of the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles. The catalogue is available from éditions Textuel for €39.

Harry Gruyaert: Away from Home, Yet Everywhere at Home