David Hurn – författare

Featuring works by some of Britain's best-loved photographers - Tony Ray-Jones, David Hurn, Martin Parr, and Simon Roberts - this book explores our changing relationship with the seaside over the last six decades and holds up a critical and affectionate mirror to a much-loved and quintessentially British experience. Published to accompany the 2018 National Maritime Museum exhibition The Great British Seaside: Photography from the 1960s to the Present, this book showcases over 100 photographs, including material from each of the photographers' archival collections, newly commissioned works, and never-before-seen images.

Wales As Is – a new collection of work by Magnum photographer David Hurn – offers a meditation on the national character of Britain’s smallest country. His subject is the geography, topography, history and landscape of Wales which he presents with unsentimental clarity, in his signature documentary style. The collection gently interrogates Wales’s propensity for self-mythology and romanticism, capturing the bathos and humour prevalent in everyday life, juxtaposing the spirit of the landscape with the demands made on it by industry, housing and transport. Richard King’s accompanying essay examines the position of the landscape and its idealisation within Wales’s conception of itself. His words give lyrical context to images which are by turn arresting, troubling, thought-provoking and joyful.

Magnum's David Hurn is one of Britain's most influential documentary photographers. His work is characterised by a quiet observation and singular insight, his natural inclination towards ordinary people in their everyday lives. In 2016, Hurn casually started an Instagram account to allow him to share constructive photography advice: tips, books and recommendations. His stream developed to include reflections on photographs from his 60-year career; his ennui during the endless days of lockdown; the work of fellow photographers; and a grappling with questions of AI and artifice in photography. There are photographs here from the Hungarian revolution in 1956, on the set of The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night in 1964, trips to Arizona between 1979 and 2001, Halloween celebrations in his local Welsh village during the pandemic, and many more. A love of the land is also evident in much of his work. Printed in exquisite quality, the large book format does justice to Hurn's photographs, while also elevating his words. An expert in his field, Hurn has no pretension, and he is generous in sharing his journey as a photographer. The theme of authenticity is woven through the pages; Hurn's plea to photographers to allow the world to be what it is' or at least to be honest when creating a fictional image. Hurn writes, 'It seems to me that in whatever form of communication, be it painting, sculpture, music, dance, photography, even speech, our job is to try to communicate to others as honestly, accurately, authentically, what we saw, felt, thought, at a particular time.' Bringing these individual Instagrams from the past seven years together in a compendium has its own considered beauty. The immediacy of a social media post is here turned into a more expansive and contemplative diary from a true master of his art.

Wales is a country and society changing perhaps more than most. Political devolution, a new economy, the resurgence of the Welsh language are among several factors which authors, artists, historians and social commentators are currently addressing. Magnum photographer David Hurn adds his particular record of change in a more oblique -- though nonetheless telling - way than most. Here are duotone portraits of a hundred of the people who shape contemporary Wales, who have, in Hurn's words 'enriched my life and that of Wales'. Living in Wales is an album of famous figures and distinguished practitioners from the fields of science, business, the arts, sport, the law, health, media, politics and religion, from Jan Morris, Antony Freud and John Harvey Jones to Bernard Knight, Dafydd Wigley and Colin Jackson. In between are photographs of the 'ordinary' people who also 'enrich the life of Wales': ice cream makers, publicans, chimney sweeps and waitresses. The subject of each portrait answers the same short set of questions, and in doing so makes this book a multifaceted portrait of Wales itself. All the photographs are shot in Hurn's characteristic style, the lens lingering on the physicality of the person but also diverted by a telling prop into the possibilities of narrative. If Wales is the unseen subject of this collection, the printed images show a photographer in inspirational form with the individuals who make up the country.