050 - David Alan Harvey
© David Alan Harvey
Magnum legend David Alan Harvey was born in San Francisco in 1944 and raised in Virginia. He discovered photography at the age of eleven. Thereafter he purchased a used Leica with savings from his newspaper route and began photographing his family and neighborhood in 1956.
When he was twenty, he lived with and documented the lives of a black family in Norfolk, Virginia, and the resulting book, Tell It Like It Is, was published in 1968 (and recently republished by Burn Books).
David was named Magazine Photographer of the Year by the National Press Photographers Association in 1978. He went on to shoot over forty essays for National Geographic magazine and has covered stories around the world, including projects on French teenagers, the Berlin Wall, Maya culture, Vietnam, Native Americans, Mexico, Naples, and Nairobi.
He has published two major books based on his extensive work on the Spanish cultural migration into the Americas, Cuba and Divided Soul, and his book Living Proof (2007) deals with hip-hop culture.
In 2011, David produced an award-winning book of his work from Rio De Janeiro entitled (based on a true story), which was highly acclaimed for both the photography and its innovative design by David's son, filmmaker Bryan Harvey. The entire creative process during the shoot was documented on the website theriobook.com, where for $1.99 you could (and still can!) effectively attend a virtual workshop to gain an invaluable insight into David's working practices and benefit from his many years of teaching and mentoring.
His work has been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Nikon Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Workshops, seminars and mentoring young photographers are an important part of his life. He is founder and editor of the award-winning Burn magazine, featuring iconic and emerging photographers in print and online.
David joined Magnum photos as a nominee in 1993 and became a full member in 1997. He lives in The Outer Banks, North Carolina and New York City.
“Art is coming from the mud the blood and the beer. It’s coming from the grit. It’s coming from sleeping in the street. It’s not from being successful. Art doesn’t come from being successful. Art comes from pain, from misery, from needing something. That’s why in the hell you create stuff. So success is not the thing you want to have going for you to create the next big thing…”
In episode 050, David discusses, among other things:
The few essential things he tries to teach
How contracting polio as a child was 'a lucky break' creatively
The importance of family - biological and otherwise
How the 'all time great rejection letter' led to a crucial realisation
First book: Tell It Like It Is
The importance of struggle
Being an introvert at heart
The Rio book (based on a true story)
Documenting the process at theriobook.com
Being in the zone
Shooting for National Geographic and joining Magnum
Keeping your feet on the ground
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Burn magazine
“If you don’t have someting on your mind, if you don’t have either a story to tell or an axe to grind or a celebration to have, then I don’t think you’re gonna be a photographer today… and that’s what scares so many photographers, they’ve just never looked at it like that. They never thought that’s what the lesson was gonna be about.”
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