WORLD acclaimed Magnum Photos photographer David Hurn has spoken to the Beacon about his life and new book, ‘The 1960s: Photographed’.
The book is an exploration of the 1960s throughout the UK, and a demonstration of Hurn’s mantra that the photographer “should go unnoticed”.
It contains instantly recognisable photographs from his unique coverage of The Beatles, cult film Barbarella, and Bond film From Russia With Love, and portraits of many of the major celebrities of the decade.
It also contains photographs spanning the breadth of society in 1960s Britain, from scenes of Welsh coal miners at the beach, to the revelry of the Isle of Wight Festival.
Mixed within these scenes are some of the biggest events during the 1960s, including the Aberfan tragedy and the death of Winston Churchill.
The Beacon spoke to David Hurn at his house in Tintern.
Discussing the book, Hurn highlighted the difficulty in selecting the photographs from a decade of work, and how the broad variety of subjects covered make the collection unique.
He said: “People know of the sixties, and I think people somehow equate it with celebrity.
“But perhaps what is good about the book, and why it will last, is because it’s not trying to pretend the decade was totally about personality. It has the personality in there, but it also shows you the world going round.
“Books about the sixties, and there are many, seem to be very London centric. What I was interested in was the whole UK, the celebrities were a part of it, but I was just as interested in them as others.
“It was a decade’s work, a time when I was photographing virtually every day, and so it of course was difficult to trim down. It’s almost like a magazine layout, it’s not like a ’200 best pictures of Hurn’, it’s the condensing down of the decade.
“I think it’s honest and it has a lot of pictures that most people wouldn’t see or observe to take.”
He recounted the “romantic and bit ludicrous” story of how he first decided to become a photographer, and an experience which shaped his views of photography.
In school, Hurn was extremely dyslexic, and so left with no qualifications, which led him to make the “sensible decision” of bringing forward his national service and joining the army. He was exceptionally good at rugby, a quality that had helped him through his school life, and so was soon moved down to the Sandhurst Academy.
He believed his life was mapped out at the dawn of a promising career in the army, but the power of a single photograph changed his path.
He explained: “At the time, the wall was up and so you were told that all Russians ate their children; they were the naughty enemy, so a lot of propaganda came down.
“But then one day I saw this photograph in the Picture Post, and I started to cry, which is not something you do in the Officer’s mess in Sandhurst.
“The picture was simply of a Russian army officer buying his wife a hat in a department store in Moscow.
“My dad had been away for most of the Second World War, and my first real memory of my parents together in a loving way was him buying her a hat in Cardiff.
“Of course I looked at this picture and it was the same, and instantly I found that I believed the picture more than I believed the propaganda. And that really resonated in my mind."
From this experience he instantly knew he wanted to become a photographer, realising the power of “good and honest” photography.
In hindsight, he said the decision to leave the army “was mad”, as he had no qualifications and had never shot a photo before. But all he knew was “that was what I wanted to do, that simple kind of recording of every day life.”
He traveled to London, and worked in Harrods during the day, whilst taking photographs on a fold-up Kodak camera at night.
At the outbreak of the Hungarian revolution, Hurn and a friend decided to travel to cover it. They hitchhiked to Austria whilst Hurn learnt how to use his new camera by the side of the road.
In Austria, by chance they met a group of people running ambulances into Budapest, and were therefore some of the few people to get into the country after the borders had closed.
Discovering that Life Magazine correspondents were lacking a photographer, and calling himself a ‘freelancer’, Hurn covered the revolution. As he explains" “At 22 years old I had pictures in Life, Picture Post and the Observer.
“I had discovered it was best to start at the top rather than the bottom, as if you start at the top you can cling on desperately. From then on it was a matter of clinging on.”
He said how he was forced to cover current affairs up until the 1960s, but the beginning of the colour supplements in newspapers suddenly meant there was a “little slot for that quirky little story, and suddenly I was the only one that wanted to do these things.
“What I was interested in was so trivial that many photographers didn’t want to do it, but it appears that there was enough of a market in it that I monopolised it.”
This allowed Hurn to concentrate on covering topics that interested him, and meant that every subsequent project he thought up was accepted and printed in some form. He explained how “every once in a while something like Churchill and Aberfan would happen, events of such historic importance you couldn’t ignore.
“But things found in the book like the Debut’s Ball and Hammersmith Palais were just things that fascinated me that I went and did off my own back.”
This creative control allowed him to produce unparalleled photographs of the most famous celebrities of the 1960s, many of which feature in the book. He explained how “I would spend days with these people and aim to almost take ‘happy snaps’, albeit rather sophisticated ‘happy snaps’”.
This resulted in a previously unseen photographic view of major celebrities, normalising them to an extent that Hurn explains is nearly impossible in the modern world.
He says how “now it’s almost impossible to get to know people of that stature, that fame, because now they’re surrounded by PR people and you get 10 minutes with them.”
During the early 1970s, Hurn was shooting fashion assignments for Haper’s Bazaar, which meant running a studio in London at great expense. He decided to attempt an experiment of seeing if he could return to Wales, where his parents still lived.
He soon realised he could “continue to function just as easily from Wales as I could from London, and it was a third of the cost.”
His first place to look for a house was Tintern, the site of one of his earliest childhood memories and therefore a place of “positive ambience”.
There, he found a house and bought it on the same day, and has been there ever since. He explains “I’ve been blissfully happy here, it has been a lovely village to live in. I have an extraordinary view, and the people are still very good to me, because obviously I knew quite a few well known people who quite often came here to stay but no body ever bothered them.
“They allowed me to be a kind of recluse, but I have made some very good friends.”
He decided he would participate in the community by documenting it, and has been recording the village ever since.
He explains “I decided that if I recorded the village over 10 or 15 years then that body of work would be significant, as it would be one photographer, with a point of view, documenting a small village. It’s that sense of authorship.”
It is that sense of authorship, the realisation of a unique perspective in photography, that will be one of the main topics during his upcoming talk in Chepstow.
Tickets cost £2 and can be bought online, from Chepstow Bookshop or on the door. For more information on David Hurn’s life and work, search for his Magnum Photos portfolio online.