Brice Matthieussent – författare

New in the Photofile series, a mini-monograph on Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert. Born in Antwerp in 1941, Harry Gruyaert was a pioneer of European colour photography in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1972, he created TV Shots, a series of images created by turning the dial on a television set at random and photographing the screen. Later he travelled the world, seeking out different kinds of light and exhibiting a particular fascination with borders, interfaces and incongruous juxtapositions. A member of Magnum Photos since 1982, he describes colour as ‘a means of sculpting what I see ... it’s the emotion of photography.’ Most recently he has begun to explore the experimental freedom offered by digital photography. Autonomous, non-narrative and often witty, Gruyaert’s images are complex encounters with colour and light.

The award-winning Magnum photographer turns his lens on his homeland, Belgium. Born in Belgium in 1941, Harry Gruyaert was one of the first European photographers to take advantage of colour, following in the footsteps of US pioneers like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore. Heavily influenced by Pop Art, his dense compositions are known for weaving together texture, light, colour and architecture to create filmic, jewel-hued tableaux. As a result, they often seem closer to painting than to photography. Although his wanderlust has taken him to many exotic locations, Gruyaert has frequently returned to his country of birth. Here, in the homeland that he had considered so desolate in his younger years, he found an unexpected beauty. Urban lighting, neon storefronts, glimpses behind suburban dwellings, passers-by wandering drunkenly home, ports that never sleep, countryside with seemingly infinite horizons: his lens captures the singularity of his nation, portraying everyday life in a way that unfolds like a hyper-realistic film set. As a counterpoint to these more recent colour photographs, three portfolios of black-and-white images taken in the 1970s punctuate this visual immersion and journey through the lowlands.

The work of a masterful novelist and translator collide in this visionary and hilarious debut from acclaimed French writer Brice Matthieussent. Revenge of the Translator follows Trad, who is translating a mysterious author's book, Translator's Revenge, from English to French. The book opens as a series of footnotes from Trad as he justifies changes he makes. As the novel progresses, Trad begins to take over the writing, methodically breaking down the work of the original writer and changing the course of the text. The lines between reality and fiction start to blur as Trad's world overlaps with the characters in Translator's Revenge, who seem to grow more and more independent of Trad's increasingly deranged struggle to control the plot. Revenge of the Translator is a brilliant, rule-defying exploration of literature, the act of writing and translating, and the often complicated relationship between authors and their translators.