He didn't see color in Belgium. Not really. Everything seemed gray, he said — so he shot in black and white, because that was what was there.
Then New York.
Not the skyline. Not the famous thing. It was Pop Art: the nail polish, the neon, the deliberate vulgarity of billboards and diners and all the things that weren't supposed to be beautiful. A certain banality. A certain sense of humor he hadn't encountered before. Color became the thing he was after. He never went back to monochrome.
For fifty years he kept returning. Each visit a different city; each frame a detail he couldn't have predicted — a woman in a raincoat on a sunny day, surrounded by notes of blue; a hand emerging from a car window, red nails against the grey rush of traffic. He doesn't explain them.
For this book, filmmaker Cédric Klapisch — who pinned a Gruyaert photograph on his bedroom wall at fifteen — steps into the gaps and invents what happens next. What the photographs leave open, Klapisch enters. What he resolves, the next image reopens.
New York is not a document. It keeps moving.
