David Hurn’s On Instagram gathers seven years of posts from the account he began in 2016, when he was eighty-two, initially to offer practical advice to younger photographers. What emerged was more than an instructional feed: a sustained record of a six-decade career, extending from Hurn’s reflections on his own photographs to observations on fellow artists, photographic change, artificial intelligence, and the responsibilities of making pictures.
The images move across markedly different periods and places. Budapest during the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the set of The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night in 1964, repeated journeys through Arizona between 1979 and 2001, and Halloween in Hurn’s Welsh village during the pandemic all enter the sequence. Landscape recurs as a particular concern, as does Hurn’s attentive interest in ordinary life. Yet this is not presented as a conventional retrospective. Photographs and commentary are given comparable weight, allowing the book to function as both a career survey and an extended meditation on photographic practice.
Its central principle is authenticity: the obligation to communicate honestly what was seen, felt, or thought at a particular moment, whether the image records the world directly or is deliberately constructed. Hurn’s position carries the authority of long practice. A self-taught photographer who joined Magnum Photos in 1965, founded the School of Documentary Photography at Newport College of Art, and wrote On Being a Photographer, he brings together here the working convictions that have shaped his teaching and pictures.
For collectors, the book’s particular interest lies in its form as a self-curated late statement. Material that first appeared in the immediate, provisional language of Instagram has been reorganised as a substantial English-language hardcover, giving Hurn’s photographs and words room to be read together. On Instagram is therefore valuable not simply as an overview of an important documentary career, but as a direct account of how an experienced photographer understands craft, truth, and the changing conditions of photographic communication. [evidence_17520, evidence_17521, evidence_17522]
