Harry Gruyaert: Between Worlds

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A collection of seventy-five images that connect one realm with the next, this volume shows that beyond the marvelous colorist that he is, Gruyaert’s images also depict a photographer’s vision of the world. In his new book Between Worlds, the artist assembles his archives to deliver the essence of his visual writing: a luminous alchemy at the service of immersion in the image. In this book, the intimate perspective and the passage of time reveal the unknown truths about a man, a family and an entire country. The first ever book about Cuban record sleeve design, compiled by Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker, Cuba: Music and Revolution , when Cuba’s Special Period, brought about by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of Russia’s financial support for the Cuban government, led to the demise of vinyl-record manufacturing in Cuba. Hilariously funny, sometimes rather sad, but invariably interesting, this is a superbly diverting book.

His very intuitive and physical sense of place immerses the spectator in a world that borrows simultaneously from the cinematic universe and from that of the painter. He is the only artist of his stature who has not been represented by a monograph, which the dazzling presentation of images in Richard Smith: Artworks now fulfils. And after the initial joy of growing comfortable with many layers of content, the question becomes: What is the relationship of all these layers to each other and then to us? Meet Monsieur Benoit, who appeared suddenly in Paris with a scheme for telegraphing messages across the world (or, at least, across the room) by means of electricity and the telepathic power of snails, and actually raised the money to build this extraordinary machine.

One of the things that’s fascinating about this collection is the way every image has multiple narrative lines. Generously illustrated with hundreds of colour images, Cuba: Music and Revolution presents the history of Cuban record cover art, including many examples previously unseen outside the island itself. Richard Glyn Jones has cast his net wide to gather these accounts of human oddity and eccentricity, and the standard of his writing is high, with Lytton Strachey, Derek Hudson, Christopher Sykes and Ronald Knox among the authors included. The artwork here reflects both the cultural and musical depth of Cuba as well as the political influence of revolutionary communism. Magnum photographer Harry Gruyaert’s work has always been thrilling in the way it articulates a particular way of seeing.

Prof David Alan Mellor investigates and explains the Anglo-American cultural contexts that drove Smith’s art, while Alex Massouras’s two themed essays, ‘Young and British’ and ‘From Motion Pictures to Flight’, explore Smith’s originality from fresh perspectives. He photographs things we’ve all seen – think about TV Shots, his documentary/commentary on British society made of photographs of television screens – but never seen quite the way he does.Harry Gruyaert is renowned for his photographs of India, Morocco and Egypt as well as of the west of Ireland, and for his use of colour. Tipping over into photography, dissolving the boundaries between exterior and interior spaces, closed world or open world, forgetting oneself in a suspended time. We pay very close attention to new, visually striking, thought-provoking imagery, while respecting the long-lasting tradition of photography in its purest incarnation.