Home, Sanctuary

Talking about a life spent living in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, David Alan Harvey describes it as a “circle of sorts.” Since childhood, the Magnum photographer has become a fixture in the local area which is now naturally ingrained in his mind as a symbolic and formative place. “No matter where I am,” he says, “I’m always bringing up in my hard drive my sense of home.”

In his series for Magnum Home, the photographer chose to turn his lens toward his family in their local surroundings. Connecting the philosophical to the human, his portraits of a child suggest the cyclical nature of familial generations; shoreline photographs of the slowly eroding sands of Nags Head are reminders of the attritions of time. “There’s no permanence to this place,” he says. Moved to document it over the next 20 years, Harvey offers a serendipitous take on the landscape he was brought up in.

Magnum Home, an international project conceived by Fujifilm, gave sixteen Magnum photographers an open brief which asked them to define their concept of ‘home’ through their own singular approaches. Touring seven cities, a large group exhibition showcases their varying responses to the brief. In the lead up to the exhibition opening in Busan, South Korea, David Alan Harvey shares what ‘home’ means to him.

“As a young boy with a camera, all I had to photograph was my home, my family and a few blocks radius around our house. I was simply an aspiring photographer with a dream. Later indeed, dreams in fact came true, and now I am able to travel and absorb the world around me. Yet, even while I might be sitting at a sidewalk café in Paris, in the back of my mind I am thinking of my front porch in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.”