Now age 87, Magnum Photos member David Hurn remembers the fateful day in February 1954 that first brought photography into his life. While on break, the young army cadet training at Sandhurst Military Academy was paging a copy of Picture Post magazine and stumbled upon a photograph of a Russian army officer buying his wife a hat in a Moscow department store.
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“I started to cry – not something one normally did in the officers mess,” says Hurn, who describes how the picture triggered a memory of his father who he hardly saw during World War II. “One of the first acts he did at the war’s end was to take my mother, me in tow, to Howells, a department store in Cardiff, to buy her a hat: my first recollection of their love for each other.”
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Suddenly understanding the power of the photography, Hurn decided in that moment to become a photographer despite knowing nothing about the medium. “Thinking back, I have no recollection of ever having taken any pictures,” he says. “To give up a firm profession for a total abstract one was reckless.”
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