David Hurn – författare

Featuring works by some of Britain's best-loved photographers, 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.

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.

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.

Writing the Picture is a rare collaboration between a leading photographer and an eminent poet. Even more rare, it is a collaboration in which the poet responds to images, rather than a photographer or artists 'illustrating' a poem. The book evolved from a previous assignment for The Independent in which Fuller agreed to write about Hurn's pictures as long as the 'captions' could be poetryA". The result was a group of startlingly good poems which drew upon and illuminated a selection of Hurn's equally stunning images. Writing the Picture extends that early success into a book of 50 duotone images and poems in which Hurn's particular skill as a photographer of reportage sparks Fuller's own skill as a writer who both draws out meaning and launches into the thought-provoking. The sheer variety of image and poem makes the book an all the more impressive achievement. From warm portraits of rural Wales to a drug addict shooting up in London, from a raucous hen night to a moving suite of images of the aftermath of the Aberfan disaster, photographer and poet respond to all aspects of life. The result is such a marvellous and magical meeting of artforms that it is surprising it doesn't happen more frequently. Hurn and Fuller provide an intriguing Introduction by way of a 'conversation' in which they discuss the processes of their collaboration and the differences and similarities which poetry and photography share in the creating of art.