Arizona Trips

When David Hurn first went to Arizona in 1979, he was coming from Wales — from rain, from green, from a very different political and social climate. Arizona offered the opposite: heat, dryness, space, a sharper public tone. The contrast drew him in, and he kept returning for more than twenty years.

Arizona Trips brings together photographs made between 1979 and 2001. The subject is not the dramatic West of cinema, but everyday Arizona. Classrooms. Church halls. Parades. Fitness groups. Living rooms. Open stretches of desert that seem to hold everything in suspension.

Hurn works without spectacle. His camera stays at eye level. People are photographed in the middle of their lives, not arranged for effect. The pictures feel steady, patient, sometimes dry in humor, sometimes quietly tender. The landscape is never romanticized; it is simply there — expansive, bright, unforgiving.

Published on the occasion of Magnum’s 70th anniversary, this book isolates a single, long relationship between a photographer and a place. It reads as a record of time spent looking carefully and without hurry.

This copy is signed by the artist.