David Hurn: A Life in Pictures

Photographer David Hurn is 83, and still working.

He's flown from his home in Wales to LA, to meet a film star

he hasn't seen for nearly 50 years.

We're on our way to see Jane Fonda.

I'm slightly apprehensive.

And when I last saw her,

we were extremely close, a closeness based on trust, mutual trust.

And of course, in that time,

media has become less trustworthy, and I'm just hoping that she doesn't

think that I might have fallen into that trap.

Which I haven't, obviously, but I could understand if,

when I meet her, she's a little bit apprehensive.

I love shooting pictures, because it's kind of like a game.

You're trying to capture, in one picture, the essence of what

you feel about something.

For more than 60 years, David Hurn has been an acclaimed photographer.

He's taken pictures of ordinary people, and the most famous.

Across the world, and in his homeland of Wales.

In all of his photographs there's a humanity, a warmth,

and an impish sense of humour.

Oh, my God, David!

-David, how many years has it been? 60, 50?

-50. Too long.

BOTH SIGH

-Oh, we spent so much time together!

-I know, and you look so gorgeous.

You were the only one that took pictures of "Barbarella"

-that whole time.

-Yeah, absolutely.

-Yeah.

-It was fun.

Since 1974, David Hurn has lived in the village of Tintern

in the Wye Valley.

CAMERA BEEPS

CAMERA SHUTTERS

I remember coming to Tintern Abbey as a treat.

I must have been, again, four or five,

or something like that.

And I remember thinking it was nice,

so I thought, "Well, if I go

"back to Tintern, the vibes might be good".

I saw the house straightaway, and I bought it the same day.

And I've been blissfully happy here, it's a very happy place.

The cottage in Tintern is a treasure trove of 60 years and more

of taking pictures.

David's decision to be a photographer was accidental.

Originally, he was set on a career in the Army,

but one photograph in a magazine changed all that.

These are the original Picture Posts that I saw when I was at Sandhurst,

in the officer's mess, and...

..I was there, and opened up this page, looked at this picture,

and started to cry.

And crying is not what you normally do in the officer's mess.

And the reason why it had such an emotional impact for me is that

my dad was away during most of the Second World War.

And when he came back, one of the first things that he did

was to take my mum with me in tow to Howells in Cardiff,

and he bought her a hat.

When I saw this picture...

What is it? It's a picture of a Russian army officer

buying his wife a hat, and so that brought back the memory.

Being at Sandhurst, I had, you know, quite reasonably,

heard, sort of, propaganda about the Russians being the enemy,

and, you know, they all ate their children, or something like that.

And suddenly, I realised that I...

I actually believed the photograph more than the propaganda.

I looked at this and thought,

"Hang on, these people are actually ordinary,

"they're like my mum and dad".

And that had such an incredible effect on me that I literally,

at that point, decided I wanted to be a photographer.

CRASHING

David's first opportunity to follow that dream came in Budapest in 1956,

when the Hungarian people rose up against their

Russian-backed government.

GUNFIRE

On spec, he hitchhiked across Europe, and was soon in

the heat of the action.

When I was in Budapest, I was aware that I had no idea

what was going on, you know, so I've always had good instincts,

trying to get hold of good people... to advise, you know.

And it seemed to me that I had to work out where the best journalists

were, and Life magazine had some very brilliant writers there,

but they either had no photographer that had gotten in,

or maybe one had gotten in.

And they saw in me a fresh face, but they didn't realise that,

sort of, in the back room, I was still reading my book on

how to use my camera.

And they said, "Oh, well, you can be a photographer,

"you can work with us here," because they didn't have anybody else.

David's photographs of Budapest immediately stood out.

Much more than straightforward reportage, they showed his eye for

the quirky detail, and were reproduced back in Britain.

The pictures that I took in Hungary were published a little bit

in Picture Post.

And this is The Observer, November the 11th, '56.

This is extraordinary, I remember, when I took this picture,

being incredibly moved by the fact that this child

was so young with a gun.

I guess I was 22...

'56, yes, 22, OK.

It was the first instance I had seen of children being...

..in a war situation.

And this was the camera, I took this camera, this lens,

and a pocket full of film, and went to Hungary.

And...

And that was really the start of everything, that was...

..you know, from then on, it was being serious, you know.

Without this, perhaps, who knows?

David's Hungarian photographs, and many more, featured as part

of Photo London, a major photography event held in May 2017

at Somerset House.

David's show was called "Swaps", and included some of his best-known

pictures, along with those he swapped with other members

of Magnum, the world's most prestigious photographic collective.

The exhibition shows this extensive collection

that David has built up by

exchanging prints with

other photographers.

But in the show, we've really just concentrated on

his Magnum colleagues, because he's got hundreds of these prints,

and we're showing 70 or 80, and he has accumulated this

remarkable collection for absolutely no outlay.

So, it's a very clever idea, and I think you can see here in the show,

you know, the quality of his selection, and the quality of

his eye in not only him as a photographer himself,

but the pictures that he's chosen from the different photographers

really make a good exhibition.

Great photographs are now valued in tens of thousands of pounds.

But when David started swapping, nobody thought of collecting them.

Photographs were only produced for a purpose, of which one of the

purposes was to go into magazines and newspapers.

So there wasn't that sort of art thing.

So if you said to somebody, "I really like your picture,"

all they were doing was giving you a bit of a paper, basically.

So there was no, sort of, thought that it had a value.

And so I started to collect, at that point.

You know, I would go out of my way and knock on doors and things,

and one of the people that I wanted to meet was Bill Brandt.

And so, he was a great hero of mine.

-So did you knock on Bill Brandt's... Oh, sorry, David...

-Yeah?

So you knocked on Bill Brandt's door, and he came in and he said,

-"Oh, take a print"?

-More or less.

Fantastic.

What is perfect for me was that, obviously, I shot all my pictures...

..just the way I shoot pictures, you know, of which I hoped

went into a magazine, cos that's what stops me dying of malnutrition.

Somebody buys a picture and I can work for another week, you know.

And now, what is puzzling...

..is that those pictures have gone from being just journalism,

or something like that, they've gone from that to being actually

that that's most sold on gallery walls, you know.

I never quite understand how this works.

Don't worry, we'll guide you.

-OK.

-Oh, there you are, good.

By the early '60s,

David was in London,

building a reputation as a photojournalist.

He was friends with future film

director Ken Russell, who filmed David for two BBC documentaries.

HE GROANS

Sit down... Oh, it's cold, isn't it?

All I want you to do is to go over, sit in the bath,

and then the pictures are all going to be sort of semi-abstract,

long legs, funny hands, almost fashion-y.

Do you understand exactly what I want?

Anyway, you sit there and I'll dictate and go, OK? Go, bless you.

Most of the time, I was spending my time in coffee bars,

and things like that.

And I'd bumped into somebody called Ken Russell, you know.

And he...had just given up being a ballet dancer,

and he was making films,

but he would talk about this with a passion, and I could talk

about what I was trying to do with a passion, and we got on,

because we were talking about something we were doing.

And, of course, I was surrounded

by incredible young people.

I mean, roughly the same age as me.

You know, when you think that... McCullin was starting at the...

with me, Philip Jones Griffiths was starting.

I mean, this, in my opinion is the greatest block of British

photographers there's been.

And they were altogether starting, and boy,

is that good, to work with people of that stature.

There we were, young photographers talking about

a word called "photojournalism".

Something we didn't really totally understand.

And so, when we got together, we kind of...

..we would just meet each other and feel excited, and happy,

and enthusiastic, so we kind of were like young puppies, really.

We were just so wound up with what we thought the future

could bring to us.

And it turns out it wasn't a bad future that came to us, in the end.

An incredible bit of luck was that the colour supplements started,

and suddenly, all these other guys who were in competition

with each other for a certain kind of story, but always

in the various magazines, there was a little slot for the ordinary.

You know, they needed a bit of light relief.

And the only person that was really interested in doing that

as their major thing, as their authorship, was me.

So I didn't think I ever did a story that wasn't published.

David's work wasn't only light relief.

Ken Russell's second film shows him

photographing a group of nuns,

caring for the sick in London's slumland.

These are lovely, these are, I think they're called the Sisters of Mercy,

who were nursing sisters that worked in Notting Hill Gate,

and they worked with people that were so near-death that hospitals

and things wouldn't take them, and they just used to go and sit

with them for the last couple of days of their life.

And I mean, this is extraordinary,

this poor man, you know, probably died the next day, or something.

And this lovely lady, with great tenderness, looking after him.

Boy oh boy, that's a tough job.

But this is what I do, photographically, I love this

sort of...idea of getting...

..right inside a story, so that you know the people that are involved,

and you're part of the...an accepted part what's going on.

And then you, it's simple, as I often say, "You just stand in the

"right place, and press the button at the right time".

And it takes care of itself.

But this is very much me.

This idea of doing something on a particular person...

..that does something really worthwhile, you know.

And they loved the car!

They loved the car.

One of the nuns in the car, and we go for a drive,

and then, when I came back, there was almost like a queue of them.

We spent a whole flipping day, me just driving around with them,

each having a turn...

..sitting in the passenger seat of the car.

They absolutely loved it.

ENGINE ROARS

Alongside his documentary work,

David was at the heart of London's swinging '60s,

taking pictures of fashion models and movie stars.

He was on location for A Hard Day's Night, and captured the Beatles

at the height of their fame.

Most of the people I photographed, you know,

people like Peter O'Toole, et cetera, you know, Peter O'Toole

was just out of RADA...at that time.

And these were people in the main starting their careers,

and if you have a sort of style of doing that, and my style

was very simple, which that I knew that I wasn't very good

at posing people, I wasn't interested in that,

so I would just sit and chat to people, and I'd take pictures

as they were sitting around.

And that developed into a kind of

style, and then, you know,

if I look at the group of friends

that I had at that time, who,

in hindsight, are an extraordinary group of people who,

as I said before,

luckily I photographed them

as a natural instinct,

and my instinct, all the time, is to take pictures of people.

It was enormous fun, it was enormous fun.

David also worked on many classic

films, including the Bond movies.

His most famous Bond photo nearly didn't happen, when the publicist

forgot to bring the gun.

But David had a solution.

One of my hobbies was, quite serious, target shooting...

..but with an air pistol.

And I said, "It happens that the pistol I use is a Walther.

"And their pistol has a long

"barrel on it, but when they come

"to do the poster,

"the graphic artist can cut it off".

So, there is Sean Connery with his air pistol.

Of course, they forget to tell the graphic artist to do this,

so if you look at the posters for the first few films,

they're all of the Sean Connery with an air pistol.

These things are just wonderfully bizarre, aren't they?

I mean, it just makes me laugh every time I think of it, you know.

MUSIC: (Theme From) Barbarella by The Glitterhouse

Her name is Barbarella.

And she makes science fiction something else.

Jane Fonda is Barbarella.

The star David had the closest relationship with was Jane Fonda.

They met on the set of the film Barbarella,

directed by her then-husband, Roger Vadim.

The actress had vetoed all of the other photographers

the film's producers had brought in.

So I went over and shot some pictures, and she looked at mine,

and she vetoed, you know, quite a lot, and...

..so I kept them, and then showed them to her later, and she vetoed

a different lot, and I said, "This is silly, you're not even

"vetoing the same pictures, why don't you just have trust in me,

"and let's get on?" And she laughed, and we were away.

-It's lovely to see you, it really is.

-Oh, David.

Yeah, I think about you all the time, and I'm so happy...

-I know, yeah.

-..that you're here.

-It's very emotional.

-We had a lot of fun.

-We did, we did.

-We really did.

Even though we haven't seen each other for years, David,

there's no getting away from you, because every single time

a fan asks me for an autograph,

invariably, it's a picture from Barbarella.

And you are the only still photographer that took the

publicity stills that became so iconic.

-On the cover of what, how many magazines?

-Like 100 covers, we had?

-Yeah, yeah.

-Something like that.

Extraordinary amount, the most I think any film's ever had.

And you...took all of them, you were the only photographer.

I know, I was so brilliant.

THEY LAUGH

That's right, you were!

-Oh, I remember that.

-Yeah, yeah...

SHE GASPS

The day that we did the naked...

-..the title sequence, when I did the striptease in space...

-I know, yes.

-That's right.

-..that I got drunk to do.

HE LAUGHS

I probably was drunk there.

And then we had to shoot it over again the next day,

-you remember that?

-Yeah, yeah.

So I not only got drunk the next day, I also was hung over.

THEY LAUGH

I don't find Barbarella a very sexy movie, I think it's more

kind of fun and camp.

But what I've discovered over the decade, the millennia,

is that for boys of a certain age, this was...

..their coming-of-age movie.

Which makes me very happy.

A lot of boys had their first erection with...including

Richard Branson, who volunteered that information to me.

SHE LAUGHS

And this I like, as well, because

one of the things I loved was the fact that you were so respectful

to the crew and they loved you so much, and it's really nice

when you get somebody like yourself in a film that the crew like.

How can you tell the crew like me?

-I'm over here, and they're over there looking.

-Well, because...

-Well...

-They did, though, we had a good time.

Because I knew all the crew, and one of the nice things about being

a photographer like this is one can be close to you,

-but one can be close to the crew, as well.

-And you can find the scoop.

It's a good sign, when people get on with the crew,

it's a pretty good sign.

See, what's so interesting is

you were on the set for Barbarella

but then you were in our home with the personal family stuff,

and not many people have taken pictures of that time in my life.

Absolutely.

Here we are, this is the dogs.

Oh, my God, remember when we rented that...

I know! Rented a plane to fly them all back.

A plane to fly them all back!

-Look at them all. Oh, my God.

-I know, isn't that lovely?

Wow, I remember that, we laughed so hard.

You know when you've...

..been married and then...

And then you've been divorced,

and the husband has died and decades have gone by,

and then you see these pictures of happiness...

-Yes.

-And it's very nice to remember that, yeah,

he did teach me how play chess...

..and we were happy.

Yeah.

And this is my favourite picture of you.

Well, that should... Means you don't like me very much.

No, it's just so full of joy and so relaxed.

And I love that sort of picture where... You can only take a picture

like that if you're really very close to somebody.

-Yes.

-Yeah. It's...

It's...

I remember that hammock.

I know, that was in the garden.

So, talk to me with lots of hands going.

-Oh, you want the Italian.

-Yeah, yeah.

Well, as far as I know...

-VOICEOVER:

-I could tell literally within seconds that, you know,

this was going to be fine.

I guess I was a little bit nervous as to what the reaction would be,

and it was just immediate warmth.

I mean, it was kind of taking off...

..from where we were before.

Part of the trick is to get to that relaxed state,

but still remain being a photographer, you know.

And that I could do.

And it's just lovely that that relationship has obviously continued.

And I...

I was very moved.

Since his first visit there in 1962,

the USA and its people have always been

a source of fascination for David.

He's photographed across the States, from New York to Arizona,

and still finds it inspiring.

We're on Venice Beach, California.

At the play beach in a sense, the eccentric play beach in a way.

I love America.

The people are very open.

You can kind of talk to anybody.

I mean, just now I was on the beach and there was somebody there

meditating, doing his whatever he does, you know.

I said, "Good morning," and instantly, you know, he was,

"Good morning" back, and,

"Oh, what are you doing?"

sort of thing.

And suddenly you're in a conversation, and then, you know...

And my photography relies on

warmth and liking people and trying to understand

what they're doing.

And, you know, if you get that feedback it really helps enormously.

So, I've never not liked being in America.

It's always been...

..a joy to me.

Well, I saw them.

It seemed to me they were amongst the trees

and they were doing something

which I don't normally see people doing in Tintern.

It was... The pattern was right,

the geometry of a picture's very important to me.

And I realised that, and I got in and asked them what they were doing.

And they're lovely because they're out there and they're trying and

they're practising, and I just think

that's so incredibly positive, isn't it?

I mean, I'll always be puzzled by this thing of people saying, "Well,

"I can't take pictures of people."

Well, it's simple.

You go up and take an interest in them,

and then you point your camera at them.

And if you have a very good sense of design and, you know,

if you observe rather than look.

In other words, you're watching the way hands move

and all those sorts of things going on, you get a picture.

And if you're incredibly lucky maybe it's a nice picture,

which lasts the test of time.

Many of David's most enduring images are of Wales.

Born to a Welsh family and brought up in Cardiff,

he was one of the first photographers at Aberfan in 1966.

The tragedy, where 116 children died when a coal tip collapsed on their

school, had a profound impact on him.

That affected me more I think than any story I'd ever done.

I was in Bristol on my way back to London

and heard on the radio about it.

And so we turned the car around and we went to Aberfan,

and we arrived I think in the afternoon.

And this was obscene, you know, it was an obscene event.

There were miners trying to dig their kids out of slurry, you know,

that had been suffocated to death.

I mean, it's just about the most extreme situation

you could think of.

It's absolutely obvious that they didn't want us there.

But against that,

that everything that you feel about photography means that you should be

there. And so that's very delicate situation to work in and, you know,

one does one's best.

And some of my pictures were shown in Parliament and things like that.

And I did later get some very nice letters

from miners saying how pleased they were one was there.

But it was really at that point that...

..I felt I wanted to come back to Wales.

David returned to Wales in 1970.

Leaving behind the world of fashion and movies,

he travelled around the country,

photographing its landscapes and its people.

I'm a photographer, so it seemed to me logical that what I did was to

wander around Wales photographing the things

that I thought in some way

were significant.

I think I came back at a really quite lucky time photographically.

Wales still had some of the mines, you know, but they were closing.

Steel was closing.

Slate had kind of finished.

It really was a time of change.

And not only change, but change that you could see visually.

We're at the very top of Snowdon...

..and it's... It's just a magical place, isn't it?

I mean, it's everything that I want, being a photographer, you know.

I mean, you're surrounded by people all doing wonderfully eccentric

things. And you can...

If you observe a lot, you know, they set up wonderful patterns.

And every so often they do something, and that's what I love.

I love those little moments.

Because the picture's always out there,

you're always taking it from out there,

because it's not set up, you know.

But sometimes you just see people come together,

and they come together in an extraordinary magical form.

But you're a photographer and you can capture it

in a fraction of a second if you're very lucky.

You know, most of the time it goes and you miss it.

But when you get home and look at it and find it, you think,

"God, that was really fun."

You know, "That was worthwhile."

And I make my living doing this?

I mean, heaven forbid.

It's magical.

Last time I was here was 1970.

-Oh, wow, wow.

-So, where have you all come from?

-New Zealand.

-New Zealand! That's a long walk.

We started yesterday!

I think he has this wonderful ability

to take photographs that everyone can identify with.

You know, he says himself

that he likes to take photographs of ordinary people

doing ordinary things.

And when you see his photographs,

you can really relate to them.

But there's also kind of an underlying humour.

I do find that the photographs that he's taken of his home country of

Wales are beautifully observed.

And I think in years to come are going to be very significant photographs

that document society at different points

through the kind of later part of the 20th century.

One of David's most celebrated pictures of Wales

shows his extraordinary sense of composition.

Every component in that picture, the dog, the woman, the cannon,

the woman with the hat

walking up the hill - everything is perfect.

I mean, you could not look at that picture and say,

"OK, if that person was Photoshopped to the left a bit

"it might improve it."

Everything about that picture works.

And the reason why he's got that is

because he's patient, he understands,

he saw the position that had the potential, he waited.

Waited for the situation to sort of fulfil itself, and bang -

there's the picture. Magic.

If I say to you I want these pictures by this evening,

you go off and do it and if it's...

In 1973,

David began to pass on these skills

to a new generation of photographers.

He was invited to set up a documentary photography course

in Newport, the first of its kind in the UK.

..being set against the deadline.

Newport was a wonderful place that...

Because it's a tough old place, you know.

And it meant that students could literally go out in the morning

and shoot some simple little thing

and bring it back in the afternoon and be critted on it.

And if it wasn't right, they could be sent out the next day to do

the same thing again and again and again and again until they began to

understand how to get it right.

That's a very professional approach to doing things.

What you've done is a relationship with three people.

I think it was important because first off it was documentary photography,

it wasn't just photography,

it wasn't sort of commercial photography or art photography.

He had a very clear idea about what it was trying to do.

It was trying to look at the world around us and people,

to engage with that, and tell stories about what was happening.

And also this teaching method was quite unique, you know,

because it was very disciplined,

very tight deadlines.

So, it really reflected the real professional world.

So, it really did, you know,

encourage and steer people towards being a professional photographer.

Award-winning sports photographer Tom Jenkins

was one of David's students on the Newport course.

We had to find a subject to do almost every day.

One roll of film, bring it back, develop it,

make a contact sheet of it and show it to a tutor.

And I remember every time I took it to David I was more nervous than

anyone else, because I knew what a photographer he was.

And also he was hypercritical.

So, he would go through every single frame saying,

"What are you doing there?" "Why did you do that?"

"Why did you take it at that angle?"

And then would say, "Actually, look, you're actually going the right way there."

And so, every single frame was analysed.

After a while it gave me this incredible discipline to be so much

more careful about what I was taking and why I was taking things,

and why I was including that or not including that.

And he really made me think about what I was doing.

And gave me this, you know, a discipline

that I've used ever since, basically.

David always taught his students to photograph their own surroundings.

And it's a mantra he stuck to himself,

documenting the village of Tintern for over 40 years.

One of his closest friends is the vicar, Nora Hill, who's retiring,

and David's photographing her send-off from the village.

Rev Nora has been the village priest here for a long time.

She's a remarkable person.

And I just like her enormously.

I mean, I'm a total non-believer, you know,

but very early on we kind of came to an agreement

that she wouldn't try to

change me and I wouldn't try to change her.

She has absolutely enriched my life.

-You're coming down the hall, aren't you?

-Yeah.

-Yes, yeah.

One of the things I needed to do at my age is to kind of find something

I can continue to photograph easily.

And the beauty about village life is that A, you have access.

And the next thing is one gets older, you know.

And if I'm hobbling around with a Zimmer frame in the village I can

probably get from one end to the other.

So, I can just continue

photographing, you know,

my sort of fantasy death is walking down the high street and falling

over with a camera and my hand, you know,

that seems to be about as good as it can get, you know.

And Nora to come and say something over me.

But at 83, David is showing no sign of slowing down.

His home in Tintern remains the centre of operations,

with thousands of negatives and prints stored there.

But there is the question of what to do with them in the long term.

And David has joined forces with the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.

This is my earliest visual memory.

I was brought up in Cardiff, went to nursery school in Cardiff,

and my mum used to bring me here in the museum,

I must've been five or six.

And I always remembered a naughty statue.

And of course, it turns out that the naughty statute is The Kiss.

The other thing that I remember from that time is the word "donate".

I remember my mother saying,

talking about things in a cabinet and saying,

"These were donated by..."

So, in a way it's always been my life's ambition,

is to donate to the museum.

Here we have a couple of photographs.

David's donation is substantial, comprising over 2,200 photographs.

It'll form the basis of a new photography gallery

at the National Museum.

I like the idea of it being together.

David has very recently gifted a large number of photographs to

the museum. And these come in two collections.

The first collection is what he calls

a definitive edit of his archive.

The second collection is approximately 700 photographs

or thereabouts from David's private collection.

And it's a wonderfully unique collection

that really reflects David's life

as a photographer, his friendships with other photographers,

who he has kind of encountered and come into contact throughout that

period of time.

It's interesting because into Magnum suddenly there's

an influx of women photographers.

We've never had enough women photographers,

but this is a picture by Newsha,

who's one of the youngest Magnum photographers, born in Iran,

worked for a woman's magazine in Iran.

Can you imagine that at the age of 16?

Which shows courage.

And she's going to be a big star.

She's a wonderful photographer, and a lovely, lovely person.

-Yeah.

-You know,

I'm getting a great deal of pleasure out of giving this to the museum.

At the end of September 2017,

David's collection of swaps open The National Museum's brand-new

photography gallery. It was a chance for old friends to gather and

celebrate a life in pictures.

I think the exhibition is a total...

..extraordinary kind of achievement on David's behalf.

He's silently collected the most extraordinary collection

of photography that would cost millions of pounds

if you try to go out there and start it all over again.

And he's generously given it to this beautiful museum.

Young students coming to Cardiff...

..twice a year, because it'll be a six-month show,

twice a year are going to see the world's greatest photographers.

Does that inspire them?

I hope it does. If I was that age and saw this, boy, boy,

would it have sparked ambition in me to be like them.