Head of the Cabinet de la Photographie of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou Over a few months in London in 1972, Harry Gruyaert started to take colour photographs of the screen of his malfunctioning television set. An apparently trivial gesture, but one rich in meaning which fitted into two movements: the artistic and playful American Pop Art movement of the previous decade, from Nam June Paik to Andy Warhol with their fascination for the television as object and for its images; and the current in photography of the same period, from Lee Friedlander to Robert Frank, which viewed the television as an emblem of consumer society and of the modern world's alienation. By the introduction of strident colours as well as by his voluntary and exclusive focus on the screen, Harry Gruyaert offered his epoch a very singular way of looking at itself. Caught by his lens, the television became a hallucinatory or hypnotic machine, like a new Gorgon mesmerizing the modern viewer - a sensation which is reinforced today through the projection and addition of sound in the new installation set up in the Passage du Désir during the Mois de la Photo. But the approach of Harry Gruyaert also seems to be calling into question the vocabulary and habits of photojournalism. His instantaneous capturing of the continuous flux of images on the screen proposed an offbeat version: a somewhat distanced armchair journalism attesting, half-fascinated and half-horrified, to our inability to bring order into the world and its representations. "I was living in London in the early 70s. There was a television set that didn't work properly in the flat I was staying in; when you moved the indoor aerial and kept fiddling with the switches it was possible to obtain fascinating colours. At the time, of course, the video recorder didn't exist, not to mention the freeze frame or the possibility of winding backwards. So I was in live contact with what was showing, holding my camera and sometimes moving very close to the screen to frame it differently. I ended up by finding myself in a situation very close to that of street photography, in which, I believe, a good image is a question of controlling chance, a sort of small miracle." Harry Gruyaert Harry Gruyaert A Belgian photographer living in France, member of Magnum Photos, Harry Gruyaert analyses the issues of colour and its role in the construction of the image. In 2000, he published Made in Belgium (Delpire), followed in 2003 by the very wellreceived Rivages (Textuel, reprinted in 2008), a series on seasides around the world. Photopoche (Actes Sud) and TV Shots (Steidl) appeared respectively in 2006 and 2007. The prints of "TV Shots" were exhibited in 1974 at the Delpire gallery and in 2007 at Phillips de Pury & Co. in New York.