For Harry Gruyaert, New York has never been a subject to be settled once and finished. The Belgian photographer has returned to the city’s streets for more than half a century, drawn to its extremes: the skyline at dusk, neon leaking across wet pavement, and the crowded ordinary blocks where several languages cross a single frame. Harry Gruyaert: New York gathers that long acquaintance into one volume, published by Thames & Hudson in 2026.

The book is conceived as a large-format album rather than a survey. Photographs unfold across double-page spreads, one image at a time, so that turning pages acquires the pace of a storyboard — approach, arrival, interruption — instead of a run of discrete plates. That decision matters. It lets Gruyaert’s colour do narrative work, saturated reds and blues holding the eye while the street keeps moving through them.

Cédric Klapisch contributes fictional vignettes. The filmmaker’s texts are neither captions nor history; they sit beside the photographs as invented parallel action, and the book’s ambiguity is deliberate. Where the observed ends and the imagined begins is left unresolved, which is roughly how a city is experienced anyway.

Gruyaert’s place in photography gives the project its weight. A pioneer of European colour at a moment when serious work was still assumed to be black and white, and long associated with Magnum, he has spent decades testing what colour can carry in unposed situations. New York is an extreme case: photographed so heavily that any new book must justify itself by how it sees rather than by what it shows.

For collectors, the argument is structural. Two hundred pages, hardcover, built around the double-page spread, with a writer’s intervention folded into the sequence — this is a book designed to be handled as an object, not browsed as a portfolio. It is a late, assured statement from a photographer who has earned that scale.