It happened by accident.

I was at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, wandering through the museum shop, when I picked up a small book published by Actes Sud : Harry Gruyaert. I didn’t know the name. The cover caught my eye. I turned the pages and felt that familiar, quiet shock that only comes when you encounter something deeply alive.

The series was Made in Belgium. I smiled — of course. I’ve lived close to Belgium for years, studied in Brussels, and know its skies and streets well. But in Gruyaert’s lens, it was another world entirely. The damp light, the saturated tones, the way he turns ordinary streets into stage sets. There’s a kind of humour and melancholy in it — a tenderness for the banal. It reminded me of Martin Parr, but softer, more painterly.

I bought the book without hesitation. Since then, I’ve been seeing colour differently.

From Antwerp to Everywhere

Harry Gruyaert was born in Antwerp in 1941. He first dreamed of cinema, not photography — and it shows. He studied at the School of Photo and Cinema in Brussels, hoping to tell stories through moving images. But life had another plan. In the late 1960s, a trip to Morocco changed everything. There, under the scorching light, he discovered the language of colour. Kodachrome film became his muse.

At a time when black and white still ruled the world of photojournalism, Gruyaert dared to make colour the story itself. By 1982, he joined Magnum Photos — a rare colourist in a collective built on monochrome humanism. His presence there was almost an act of rebellion: proof that emotion could live in blue, red, and violet just as powerfully as in shades of grey.

Painting with Light

Gruyaert often said he reacts physically to colour. You can sense it in his images — they vibrate. His compositions are meticulous yet instinctive, almost musical. He doesn’t hunt for drama; he waits for harmony, for that fleeting instant when geometry, light, and movement align.

A purple shadow stretching across a sunlit wall. A man in a blue suit passing behind a red curtain. A streak of green light on wet pavement.

In those moments, he turns the world into a painting. The people who appear in his photographs are not subjects; they are brushstrokes. He once said he isn’t interested in “stories,” but in “what colours do to each other.” And somehow, that’s exactly what makes his work so human.

Made in Belgium — Familiar Yet Foreign

The Made in Belgium series is where I first met his gaze — and where I felt most at home.

A woman standing in front of a butcher’s shop. A man in a raincoat framed by a neon reflection. There’s something both ordinary and surreal in these scenes. Belgium, with its cloudy skies and red-brick melancholy, becomes almost cinematic through his eyes.

For me, these images feel like memories I’ve never lived: the bus stops of Brussels, the seaside of Ostend, the flicker of a café sign at dusk. Gruyaert doesn’t romanticize his country; he transforms it. The result is both humorous and heartbreaking — a portrait of a place caught between grey skies and electric light.

Airports — The Geometry of Departure

Then there’s Airports.

I’ve always found airports strangely poetic — those in-between spaces where no one quite belongs. Gruyaert captures them as no one else does: reflections on glass walls, luggage shadows sliding across polished floors, strangers framed like modern sculptures in transit.

His Last Call series feels like a meditation on modern life — the quiet choreography of waiting. Light becomes architecture; travellers become silhouettes in a composition of chrome and neon. It’s beautiful, lonely, and strangely serene. In his hands, even the act of waiting feels like art.

TV Shots — Screens and Shadows

In the 1970s, long before the digital age, Gruyaert turned his camera toward television screens. He photographed what he saw there — images already filtered, already framed — and somehow gave them new life.

The TV Shots series is hypnotic: faces distorted by static, colours bleeding into one another. It’s both pop and poetic, a reflection on how images consume us. Long before we scrolled endlessly through screens, Gruyaert was already questioning what it means to look, to be a spectator in a world saturated with light.

Morocco — Where It All Began

Morocco was the spark that ignited everything. The warmth of its light, the ochres and blues, the deep reds that seem to hum under the sun — this is where Gruyaert found his voice. He often returned, fascinated by the rhythm of daily life there. The markets, the shadows, the sudden bursts of colour against earthen walls.

In these images, colour is not decoration — it’s emotion. You can almost feel the heat, the dust, the stillness. His Morocco is both vivid and quiet, a place where time expands and every shade has a soul.

Learning to See Again

What I love most about Harry Gruyaert is not just what he photographs, but how he teaches us to look. His work isn’t loud. It doesn’t demand attention. It invites it.

Since discovering him, I’ve caught myself slowing down — noticing the red of a bus against a green hedge, the way violet shadows creep across a white wall at sunset. Gruyaert’s photographs remind me that beauty often hides in the corner of our eye.

He showed us that the everyday can be extraordinary — that the world, in all its chaos, is still full of grace if we take the time to see it.

And maybe that’s what makes his images unforgettable: they don’t just show colour; they make us feel it.

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There are photographs that strike you like thunder. You don’t know why, but they stay with you. They linger long after you’ve looked away, woven into your memory like a half-remembered dream. The work of Sarah Moon did that to me—years ago, before I even knew her name.

I think the first images I saw were her fashion editorials for Yohji Yamamoto or Issey Miyake in the '90s. I was too young to fully grasp their impact, but I felt them. That was enough. The grain, the shadow, the muted colors—they weren’t just photographs. They were whispers. Murmurs of another world, fragile and poetic, suspended between dream and disappearance. They felt different from everything else I had seen.

Years later, when I learned that these images were hers, the recognition was immediate. That soft melancholy, the tampered light, the sense of a fleeting moment held just long enough to break your heart—that was Sarah Moon.

When I read that she had just received the 2025 Grand Prix de l’Académie des beaux-arts in photography, it was like a window opened into the past. The emotion returned, intact. As if her images had never left me. So I dove back in—into her life, her work, her unique way of seeing the world.

A Life of Reinvention: Shadows and Silhouettes

Born in 1941 as Marielle Warin, Sarah Moon’s life began in a time of uncertainty and exile. Her Jewish family fled occupied France during World War II, finding refuge in England. That experience—of exile, fragility, and the shadows of history—has left an invisible thread through all her work.

In the 1960s, she became a fashion model under the name Marielle Hadengue. But posing in front of the lens was just the prelude. What she really wanted was to step behind it—to shape the image, not just be captured by it. By 1970, she left modeling to become a self-taught photographer.

Her early success was meteoric. Her campaigns for Cacharel and editorials for Chanel and Dior in the 1970s offered a new kind of femininity—soft, ambiguous, ghostly. Nothing about her women felt staged or perfected. They seemed like they were about to disappear. Sarah Moon created images “between light and shadow,” suspended in a kind of beautiful doubt.

But her artistic turn came in the mid-1980s, following the sudden death of her assistant, Mike Yavel. Shaken, she shifted away from commissioned work and into something far more introspective. “I started to photograph what I saw when no one asked me for anything,” she once said. Her camera no longer captured fashion—it captured absence, memory, loss, and the stories we can’t quite tell.

A Language of Dreams: Her Signature Visual Style

Sarah Moon’s photographs are instantly recognizable. Blurred edges. Washed-out color. Grain that feels like breath on glass. She shoots with Polaroids and large-format cameras, embracing the flaws—the scratches, the smudges, the overexposure. For her, the accident is part of the message. The fragility of the image echoes the fragility of time itself.

Her black-and-white images speak of the unconscious, of introspection, of memory. She has called monochrome “the color of the unconscious.” In contrast, her use of color is bold and open—“a language more generous, more accessible,” as she describes it.

Whether photographing women, birds, or flowers, Moon is always working in the space between reality and fiction. Her models often have their eyes closed, their faces obscured. There’s movement, blur, distortion. Her worlds feel like fables—delicate, strange, and haunting.

One of her most iconic works is the series of dreamlike photographs inspired by fairy tales—The Red Riding Hood, The Little Match Girl. But there’s no sugary nostalgia here. Her fairy tales are unsettling, steeped in loss and longing. In her world, nothing is fixed. Everything flickers.

As she once put it: “I invent situations that don't exist… I want to photograph what I can’t see.” Her images aren’t documentation; they’re intuition. A Sarah Moon photograph feels like a story you almost remember from childhood—but can’t quite place.

Feminine Gaze and Emotional Distance

Unlike many of her male contemporaries, Sarah Moon doesn’t seek to possess or control the women she photographs. There’s a deep empathy in her gaze—a complicity born from her own experience in front of the camera. She captures not power, but presence. Not seduction, but introspection.

Her iconic campaigns for Cacharel in the ‘70s and her work for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar created a language of softness and ambiguity, far from the hyper-glossy perfection that dominates fashion photography. She offered another way—a visual poetry that prioritized emotion over precision, mood over message.

In 1972, she became the first woman to shoot the Pirelli Calendar. A milestone. But also a statement. Sarah Moon showed that female gaze could rewrite fashion photography entirely, offering mystery in place of glamour, silence instead of spectacle.

A Legacy of Influence: Inspiring the Dreamers

Her impact ripples across generations. You see it in the delicate work of Paolo Roversi, with his long exposures and blurred contours, his love for softness and timeworn beauty. Roversi himself has often cited Sarah Moon as a guiding light—particularly in how she brings intimacy and imperfection into the studio.

Tim Walker, Deborah Turbeville, even new voices like Harley Weir—all share, in some way, her sensibility: the courage to distort, to blur, to whisper rather than shout. They too chase after the fleeting, the flawed, the poetic.

A Personal Epilogue

When I think of Sarah Moon, I think of Paris. Not the postcard city, but the one I used to visit as a teenager, with my parents, on weekends. We would go see my uncle— someone I cared for deeply, whose presence I still miss, and who left us far too young. Those trips were my first real encounter with art, fashion, exhibitions, photography.

I can’t name the exact moment, but in my memory, Sarah Moon’s photographs live somewhere in that Paris. Maybe in a museum bookshop. Or in a magazine at a kiosk near Saint-Germain. Maybe it was a poster on a gallery wall. But I remember the feeling. The stillness. The sense of time slowing down, of being wrapped in something fragile and melancholic.

Even now, flipping through the photobooks on my shelf, coming back to her work feels like returning to that moment. Like opening a window to a dream. Her images still speak to me, not with clarity, but with feeling.

Sarah Moon doesn’t just take pictures. She suspends time. She invents a world where everything is soft, silent, and shimmering. Where reality dissolves into reverie. Where every photo is an echo—a secret—waiting to be heard.

Writing about her is like walking through fog: you don’t arrive anywhere definitive. You don’t need to. You let yourself get lost. And in doing so, maybe, you find a part of yourself.

Books I recommend

• Sarah Moon – Photo Poche Actes Sud

• DIALOGUE - Sarah Moon, Yohji Yamamoto - delpire & co

• DIOR PAR SARAH MOON - delpire & co

• 12345 -Delpire Éditeur

• VRAIS SEMBLANTS - Delpire Éditeur

• Coïncidences - Delpire Éditeur

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I was 21, living my best life as a student in Milan. That city—so alive, so unapologetically stylish—felt like a world that pulsed in perfect sync with my own rhythm. It was 1995, and somewhere between long espresso-fueled afternoons and nights filled with reckless ambition, I stumbled upon an exhibition that would stay with me forever. Richard Avedon at the Palazzo Reale. Or at least, I think it was the Palazzo Reale. Time has blurred the details, but what I do remember is the feeling.

Walking into that space, I was immediately confronted with something radical: six hundred photographs, unframed, stuck directly onto the walls. No protective glass. No barriers. Just raw, unapologetic intimacy. Avedon’s world spilled into mine with an intensity that was almost overwhelming.

Here was a photographer who didn’t just capture images—he imprinted souls onto film. There was no neutrality, no passive observation. Every photograph was charged with his presence, his gaze, his absolute demand that the subject be seen. His work felt like a mirror, not just reflecting but revealing. I remember standing in front of Dovima with Elephants, hypnotized. It was more than fashion, more than composition—it was theater, poetry, power.

Avedon: The Man Who Saw Beyond

Born in 1923 in New York to a family steeped in fashion retail, Avedon was surrounded by style before he even understood its language. But he never treated photography as mere documentation. He was a storyteller, an orchestrator, someone who bent reality to his will to create images that lived far beyond the moment they were taken.

His genius wasn’t just in his technique—though that was revolutionary. It was in his understanding of people. He didn’t just photograph Marilyn Monroe; he captured the loneliness behind the icon. He didn’t just shoot fashion; he transformed it into a living, breathing narrative. He had an ability to strip away artifice while simultaneously creating myth.

The Signature Style: A Minimalism That Amplified Truth

Avedon’s editorial fashion photography was nothing short of revolutionary. His iconic Dovima with Elephants (1955) perfectly encapsulated his ability to blend high fashion with unexpected environments, creating an image that felt both surreal and deeply elegant. He infused his fashion images with movement and theatricality—Kate Moss and Aya Thorgren for Versace in 1993 exude a dynamic energy, while Małgosia Bela and Gisele Bündchen, draped in Dior in 2000, embody a raw, almost mythological grace. His work transformed fashion photography into something grander than clothing; it became performance, a moment frozen in time yet pulsing with life.

Avedon also possessed an uncanny ability to capture the depth of his celebrity subjects, peeling back their public personas to reveal something strikingly intimate. His portraits of Giacometti, Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe, and Bianca Jagger each tell their own story—Monroe’s melancholic vulnerability, Bardot’s untamed spirit, Giacometti’s haunted genius. He understood that a face was never just a face; it was a landscape of history, personality, and contradiction.

Beyond the glossy pages of magazines, Avedon brought his gaze to the streets. His series of street photography, including images of Harlem and Central Park in the late 1940s, showcase a different side of his artistry. Here, his subjects were not dressed in couture but in the raw authenticity of daily life—two men sharing a moment with a Dalmatian, a woman lost in thought at a café. These images, stripped of fashion’s theatrics, were no less captivating. They revealed his unerring ability to find beauty, strength, and humanity in the everyday.

Avedon’s portraits—stark, plain backgrounds, his subjects stripped of distractions—became his signature. It wasn’t just aesthetic; it was psychological. There was nowhere to hide. Whether it was Andy Warhol, the Beatles, or an anonymous coal miner from In the American West, they all stood exposed under his gaze. He didn’t just take their picture. He took their essence.

And he never played it safe. His images unsettled, disrupted. He photographed political figures, artists, unknown faces, each with the same intensity, the same demand that they exist fully in front of his lens. He made vulnerability an art form.

The Legacy: Why Avedon Still Matters

Avedon’s impact on fashion and portraiture is undeniable. He redefined glamour, stripping it of its stiffness and injecting movement, energy, and emotion. His portraits of anonymous Americans remain some of the most haunting and truthful representations of humanity ever printed on film.

But more than that, he taught us something fundamental about creation itself: that true artistry isn’t about capturing what is, but about revealing what could be. His vision continues to shape how we see photography, style, and the human experience.

His 1969 portrait of his wife Evelyn Avedon lingers in my mind to this day. It is breathtaking in its quiet intensity, a moment so intimate yet powerful in its simplicity. The tenderness in her gaze, the way the light carves her features—it encapsulates everything Avedon was as an artist. A master of revealing not just the person, but the soul beneath.

Back in Milan, I left that exhibition changed. Avedon had handed me a new way of seeing—not just photography, but people, stories, presence. Even today, I find myself drawn to his images, that unrelenting search for truth, that refusal to settle for surfaces.

Richard Avedon didn’t just take pictures. He forced the world to look.

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