Hurn’s swinging ‘60s Magnum legend David Hurn recalls the time when all the great photographers used to gather at his place to talk shop, and tells us what it was like to cover the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks
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David _ Hurn _ Profile
DAVID HURN is one of the longest-standing members of Magnum. He’s also a member of another exclusive, though unofficial, club: the rat pack of professional photographers’ professional photographers. His flat in London used to be an international hub of great photographers, models, and actors, and everyone remembers his Beatles photos, Bond posters, and the iconic Barbarella shots of Jane Fonda. The co-author of the highly-respected On Being a Photographer: A Practical Guide, Hurn has also published two out of a series of three books on Welsh culture, and now a stunning retrospective, The 1960s: Photographed by David Hurn.
Why did you decide to publish a book on the 1960s at this point in time? “One of the things I wanted to do, particularly with my pictures from the 60s, is to try to get the stories together. I always worked on my own ideas, I very rarely took assignments, so I might pitch to Vogue an idea of the last Queen Charlotte’s Ball, where debutantes knelt in front of the Queen. Obviously, the Queen got bored with that so she gave up coming, and then they all, bizarrely, kneeled down in front of a big cake. When I shot that, they probably only used one picture. So you’ve got a set that you really like and nobody ever sees them. The same goes for the current affairs stories like Churchill’s funeral and the Grosvenor Square anti-Vietnam demonstration.”
[Pages 8 and 9] Isle of Wight Festival, 1969 [Far left] Jane Fonda as Barbarella, 1967 [Top left] The Hammersmith Palais, the most famous mass dance hall of the 1960s, 1963 [Top right] The Beatles in the Abbey Road Studios, London, examining the script for A Hard Day’s Night, 1964 [Above] St Tropez beach, 1964
You’ve also included your showbiz images, but these were only a means to an end – is that correct? “Yes. I was never particularly interested in current affairs. My idea of a good day out is the sheepdog trials in the Welsh mountains, or ballroom dancing championships. Life to me is so extraordinary and bizarre. I used to love going down to Herne Bay to photograph the sun seekers. You could see a real JANUARY 2016 _ PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY _ 11
David _ Hurn _ Profile
cross-section of society there. But if you do that, there’s no chance of making a living. So the easiest way to make a living is to do something that pays you more, and gives you time to do projects that you speculate on. And sometimes the things you speculate on do incredibly well. In my case, all my pictures were shot with a magazine in mind, because back in the 60s there weren’t any galleries. “The idea of anybody calling themselves an artist was silly, because there was nowhere to hang your art. The first galleries didn’t come until the 1970s. But you discover that a definition of art is anything an art gallery can sell. It sounds cynical, but I think it’s a pretty accurate definition. So suddenly a whole lot of stuff that was photographed with one purpose, to go into magazines, ends up on a gallery wall and is sold as art.” What was your life like in London, in the 1960s? “I lived in this very big flat in Bayswater that was rent-controlled, at a time when gangsters like Peter Rachman and Mandy Rice-Davies were trying to evict existing tenants and bring in people from outside who weren’t protected by tenancy rights. Magazine photography had always been the lowest kind of photography, so all these poor photographers who came from America used to sleep in my flat. All sorts of famous photographers stayed there, and then other people realised it was a fun place to be.
We used to go out for dinner every night in the local restaurant, Bistingo in Queensway. All these photographers would go out and talk about photography, which was lovely. It seemed then that there wasn’t this gulf between different types of photography; I remember this wonderful conversation between Avedon talking about fashion pictures for Harper’s Bazaar and Marc Riboud talking about the Pope’s visit to the Holy Land. You got the feeling back then that photography was photography; it wasn’t divided up into genres and ranked according to importance.”
[Far left] Sean Connery as James Bond in From Russia with Love, 1963 [Above] Swiss actress Ursula Andress, 1962
Did all these great photographers deliberately build their own public images? “It was much less ‘me, me, me,’ and more orientated towards subject matter. The photographer was not important. But when you see the great photographers, they have authorship. It’s not artificial. If you look at the pictures by Cartier-Bresson, you can tell that they’re not by Koudelka or McCullin. Most people who talk about hierarchies, they all look like each other. So by definition they can’t be very good.”
You discover that a definition of art is anything an art gallery can sell. It sounds cynical, but pretty accurate. JANUARY 2016 _ PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY _ 13
[Right] Nudes in a bedroom, London, 1969 [Far right] Isle of Wight Festival, 1969 [Below] Amateur photographer photographs starlets at the Cannes Film Festival, 1963
The way photography is taught now is very academic, which has nothing to do with shooting pictures. Why do you think photography has become more divided now? “I have no idea why, but I could speculate that it’s to do with the way photography is taught now. It’s very academic, which in my opinion has nothing to do with shooting pictures. When I started, I was in the army; Don McCullin was in the RAF. People dived in, and we were all in our early twenties when we started shooting pictures.” Do you stay in touch with the celebrities you used to hang out with back then? “I did stay in touch with Ringo for quite a long time, and like all those things, it dissipates away. It’s one of the sad things about photography. The wonderful thing about photography is that you have to be there to do it. And even if you see somebody for a day, you become close with them. It’s part of how one gets pictures of people. But then you move on to the next 14 _ PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY _ JANUARY 2016
one, and you suddenly find that this person that you really liked, you’ll never see again. There’s nothing you can do about it.” Why did you pack up and move to Wales? “Living in London has always been expensive, and I knew that I was established enough to be able to function anywhere. It’s so much cheaper to live in Wales that I could drop all the fashion photography. I didn’t have to work on movies any more, which was quite fun to do, but didn’t produce the sort of pictures I particularly wanted.” What motivated you to start the documentary photography course in Newport? “I was asked to start a photography course, and I said I’d do it if it was possible to set up a course that offered no qualifications – because the second the course offers qualifications, there are rules about what you have to study, and none of these help you shoot pictures. The day they decided that the course was going to become a BA course, I left, because I knew it was going to be a disaster. It meant that all sorts of things would be written into the course, which I thought would be a distraction.
David _ Hurn _ Profile
At best, it would take up time from them going out shooting pictures. They’d be sitting around talking about the theory of left-handed photography with red hair, or space, or ‘truth’.” You were in Paris during the recent terrorist attacks. What was your experience? “Paris Photo closed down, and I desperately tried to get out on to the streets like the other photographers. But at my age you walk fast, because running is beyond my capability. It was like Magnum had suddenly become like a family. I haven’t had that feeling with Magnum for quite some time. When you cover something like the Paris attacks, which happened over a weekend, you rely on all the staff coming in, and they were there. Nobody asked them to – they just arrived. “And it relies on the photographers working out among themselves who’s going to go where. I’m not used to using an iPhone in that way, but every ten minutes we were getting an email saying, ‘Something is happening in this street.’ It sounds like a terrible thing to say under the circumstances, but I hadn’t done anything like that for maybe 30 years, and it was really exhilarating.”
What do you tell aspiring photojournalists when they ask you if it’s a realistic career path today? “I hear people say, ‘It’s so much harder now,’ but I don’t buy it. There are more magazines than there ever have been in the history of magazines. When we did the Grosvenor Square riots, I first had to research where the march was going to start, the route, the best vantage points, who the major leaders were, and how I could get to the American embassy early enough to get behind the police lines. Having done the shoot, I had to go back home, develop all my film, dry all my film, and make 15 sets of 15 pictures, which took all night. I then had to package them, go down to the post office, and post them off to various magazines throughout the world. Now you tell me which is easier – doing that or pressing a button on your computer?” Kathrine Anker
[Above] Angry demonstrators storm the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, 1968
David Hurn: The 60s is showing at the
Magnum Print Room [63 Gee Street, London EC1V 3RS] until 29 January. www.magnumphotos.com
The 1960s Photographed by David Hurn is published by Reel Art Press, £29.95 / $49.95 www.reelartpress.com
JANUARY 2016 _ PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY _ 15
Rising _ Stars _ Sarker _ Protick
SARKER PROTICK Sarker Protick’s ethereal portraits of his grandparents document their lives in old age, and helped to restore his close bond with them
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Just three years after completing his photographic training, Sarker Protick is internationally recognised for his work. His rise has been rapid: in 2014, he was chosen to take part in the World Press Photo’s Joop Swart Masterclass. This was followed in 2015 by winning a World Press Photo award and being invited to join the prestigious VII Photo Agency. A few years earlier, while he was studying for a degree in business administration and specialising in marketing, a career in photography wasn’t even on his radar. Like many, his only photographs were taken using the camera built in to his cellphone. “As with most people, I just took photos of friends and other everyday subjects,” he says. “But as time went by, I got into the habit of doing it. Then, when the phone stopped working, I bought an SLR camera. But even then I didn’t really know anything about photography. I didn’t know of any famous photographers or what was happening, photographically, in our country or internationally.” Encouraged by an uncle who saw that he had talent, Protick enrolled on the Professional Photography Program at the South Asian Media Academy in Pathshala. During the course, in 2011, he also attended the Chobi Mela, a major biannual photography festival held in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He was so inspired by the intensive week-long
Sarker _ Protick _ Rising _ Stars
I often visited, but the intimacy we had was lost. After ten minutes we didn’t have much to talk about. programme of exhibitions and talks that he decided that his future lay in photography. Now 29, Protick has worked on a project called ‘Love Me or Kill Me’, photographing on-set for the Bangladeshi film industry, and a series called ‘Of River and Lost Lands’, exploring the effects of river bank erosion in Bangladesh. His most personal project, which won second prize in the Daily Life category of the World Press Photo competition, is ‘What Remains’, a touching series of contemplative portraits documenting the lives of Protick’s elderly grandparents, John and Prova. He began photographing them at the end of 2011. “Both my grandparents were ill and had to stay in one room because of their physical limitations,” he says. “My grandfather had cancer and had a lot of chemotherapy. He couldn’t go out because he had little resistance to infection. When they moved to a house close to ours, I was often visiting them. By then, my grandmother had also had a few strokes, and half her body was paralysed.”
Protick had a close relationship with his grandparents when he was a child, but the bond between them broke down as he grew older and went away to university. “My grandfather was a priest and was posted to different parts of the country,” he says. “We would stay with them at Christmas and spend holidays there; it was a really special time. When I was older I often visited, but that intimacy we had was somehow lost. After ten minutes we didn’t have much to talk about,” he says. Protick was studying photography at this time, and had the idea of photographing John and Prova. He spent three hours with them for the first session. “For me, it was kind of like working, but at the same time it wasn’t,” he says. “They were very happy because I was there, because otherwise they were always alone and had no-one to talk to. They were also involved in the process of taking the photographs, so it was really exciting for them too. It gave them a positive push to do something.” The resulting body of work shows Protick’s grandparents in the day-to-day lives forced on them by old age and illness. They’re shown together and separately, sitting and staring, washing or being helped upstairs. The fact that his grandparents
[All images] From the series ‘What Remains’, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2012-2015
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Rising _ Stars _ Sarker _ Protick
were often static suited Protick’s methodical style of working. He likes to carefully compose each image using a tripod-mounted camera. He also prefers to use soft light on overcast days, which are infrequent in Bangladesh’s bright and sunny climate. As well as portraits of his grandparents, Protick also photographed the everyday objects that became important to them: a television set, photographs of them when they were younger, or a few items of 46 _ PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY _ JANUARY 2016
clothing. In these ethereal images, colours are pale and drained of vibrancy, a visual metaphor for the way his grandparents’ lives were slowly fading away. “I was experimenting with long exposures, and some were becoming a bit bright,” he says. “Slowly, I realised that it was giving a very different feeling in the photographs, one that says something about what it’s like to be in that state. I think the colour white plays a very important part in the work. White has a lot of symbolic meanings: it’s peaceful, but it can also mean death. It gives some more psychological space in the work. After a while, I consciously decided to keep the images like that, and I’ve only edited those that work in this way. As a result there are fewer images now, but they speak more profoundly.” Sadly, Prova died during the making of the series. However, John’s cancer treatment was successful, and he’s still alive today. He has prints of his favourite images from the series on his wall at home, and has been able to enjoy his grandson’s success. “The first time I exhibited ‘What Remains’ in Bangladesh, I gave a talk at the gallery and arranged a car to take him there. After seeing the work, lots of people were hugging him and taking pictures of him. Everybody was giving him so much respect, and I think it was a very special moment for him.” David Clark
Sarker _ Protick _ Rising _ Stars
[All images] From the series ‘What Remains’, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2012-2015
JANUARY 2016 _ PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY _ 47
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