[The Guardian] The big picture: Harry Gruyaert’s ​sun-dappled Spanish picnic

The big picture: Harry Gruyaert’s ​sun-dappled Spanish picnic

The photographer delights in colour contrasts as he makes a psychedelic pattern of al fresco eating

If you were telling the history of photography through the Magnum agency you might compare Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous pictures of families picnicking on the banks of the River Marne, taken in 1938, with this image by Harry Gruyaert, of families eating in the sunshine in Extremadura, Spain in 1998. Cartier-Bresson set the black-and-white documentary tone of the agency he co-founded for several decades. His picnickers had a belt-and-braces solidity, apparently timeless working men and women on their Sunday off. His camera gave them gravitas and a sort of idealised humanity. In Gruyaert’s picture the social history of the families themselves seems of little interest; his eye is entirely for the play of light and colour. He might take his inspiration from Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Glory be to God for dappled things!”

Some of the elder statesmen at Magnum tried to block Gruyaert’s election to the agency when his work was proposed in 1981. They had never admitted to their democratic cabal a photographer who worked primarily in colour, which they associated with advertising images, not photojournalism. Cartier-Bresson had famously declared colour pictures to be “something indigestible, the negation of all photography’s three-dimensional values” – and here was a man, Gruyaert, who had partly made his name taking pictures of newfangled colour television screens.

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