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. 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.
