Gruyaert was born into an orthodox Catholic family in Antwerp. He developed an interest in the photographic medium at a young age, owing largely to his father’s job as a film producer in a local factory. Though forbidden from pursuing photography as a career, he defied his family and went on to study photography and filmmaking at the Institut National de Radioélectricité et Cinématographie, Brussels from 1959–62. Soon after graduating, he moved to Paris to work as an assistant to American-born photographer and filmmaker William Klein, also dabbling briefly in television and fashion photography. He began to develop an interest in colour as a formal element after his 1968 visit to the US and a crucial encounter with Pop Art and its preoccupation with the banal and common. It was his encounter with the landscapes, colours and shifting lights of Morocco in 1969, however, that signalled his decisive shift towards form and effect in his compositions. After his withdrawal from television, he made a series called TV Shots in 1972, inspired by the ubiquity of television in the UK and the US, where it had become an indispensable way of engaging with the world. The series featured distorted images on television screens of shows and world events — such as soap operas and the Munich Olympics — as a parody of TV culture and the passive consumption it bred as well as the rabid press-photography of the era.

Gruyaert’s trip to Morocco — the first of many — also encouraged him to travel more and find his niche as an art photographer. He visited India in 1976, travelling across the country extensively and photographing scenes of daily life in cities and villages. Over the next four decades, he undertook over a dozen trips to India, especially to the cities of Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Varanasi and parts of rural Rajasthan and Kerala. He also travelled through Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and New Delhi, photographing marketplaces, thoroughfares and other hubs of activity. He also photographed, in less crowded settings, bright swathes of colour, such as in textiles, against backdrops of dimly lit interiors; the foggy urban landscapes of cities such as Calcutta and Jaipur, and crop fields in Gujarat and Rajasthan.