Harry Gruyaert: 70s retrospective at Museum Helmond

TV Shots

Harry Gruyaert's cathodic screenshots, included in a new retrospective at the Netherlands' Museum Helmond, captured the banality of TV shows and the era-defining world events of the 1970s

Harry Gruyaert
From September 29, 2020 to February 28, 2021, Museum Helmond will present the first Dutch retrospective of Harry Gruyaert's work. The exhibition will feature over 120 photographic works, including various series produced in Las Vegas, Russia, Morocco, India and Belgium, as well as Gruyaert's Rivages series and a number of photographs from TV Shots - a body of work presented below.

Inspired by the ubiquity of CRT televisions in the 1970s, Harry Gruyaert made photographs of distorted screen images, capturing the world as it was broadcast directly into people's living rooms: from mundane but hugely popular programs such as the British soap opera Coronation street, to the BBC's coverage of the Munich Olympics, during which eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage and eventually killed, along with a German police officer, by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September.

His abstract, experimental works, seen as an anguished parody of photojournalism, have a pop-art fascination with the everyday while acting as a document of how millions of people experienced world-shaping events through their home televisions. The work caused controversy when it was first exhibited in 1974, due to its disrespectful attack on television culture and its radical questioning of the conventions of news photography.