David Hurn

Magnum photographer David Hurn is one of the world’s most influential photographers. He covered the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, and was at Aberfan in 1966. He has shot iconic portraits of The Beatles, Hollywood stars such as Sean Connery and Jane Fonda, and leading figures across the arts, politics, science, and sport. During the seventies he established the acclaimed School of Documentary Photography at Newport. Throughout his life, he has worked tirelessly to document and interpret his homeland. His current project, Wales: The Land, is a definitive portrait of the landscape of Wales. The work collects a lifetime of material from David, with accompanying text from Richard King, author of Brittle With Relics (Faber, 2022). Representing the interface between the landscape of Wales and human intervention in it, the book is celebratory in tone, whilst also exploring attitudes towards the landscape and how it is used to represent Wales to the Welsh and to others.

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.

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.

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.