David Thurston trained as a journalist on regional daily newspapers including the Western Morning News and the Western Daily Press. It was while working as a reporter that he  revived a childhood interest in photography. But in those days of closed-shop trade unions it was impossible to be employed as reporter and photographer.

At the same time, during the 1970s, he developed an interest in what was going on in that mysterious and remote land, China. In 1979, he went on one of the very first Cook’s package tours of China. It was only two weeks but he was smitten to the extent that the next year he spent at Cambridge University learning Chinese. In 1981 he was awarded a scholarship to study at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Peking. He was the first English man to study there since before the Communist revolution in 1949. This was still the old China, the land of back alleys and a billion bicycles, their riders in standard blue, green or grey. Chairman Mao had only been dead five years and there was a deep suspicion of all things foreign.

But the sleeping giant was about to awake, though no one then could have foreseen the scale and pace of China’s economic explosion. When the year was up, Thurston returned to UK where he resumed his career on Fleet Street. It came as no surprise in 1985 when he announced he was quitting his job at the Evening Standard and heading back east to work as a photojournalist.

Based in Hong Kong, Thurston travelled the Far East as a roving correspondent for publications owned by the South China Morning Post. In 1995 he became freelance and he has had pictures published around the world, including in the Sunday Times, the Observer, Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, Forbes, and Fortune magazines. He photographed the shoes of Imelda Marcos and the feet of the Dalai Lama; a young actor named Chow Yun Fatt and opera superstar Luciano Pavarotti; a gang of peasant women building a golf course and Sony founder Akio Morita playing on one.

In November 2007, the first-ever retrospective of Thurston’s photographs, “Along The Way”, was mounted at the Waterloo Gallery in London. Thurston picked 100 of his favourite images, many of which had never been published. They are the result of a trawl through his archive, his own favourites from along the way, moments from three decades of encounters with people and places.

Most are scenes that can never be repeated showing a world that is lost forever – such as the sunset across the rooftops of old Peking or the guardians of the arsenal in British Hong Kong. It’s not all Asia: here also are pictures from Scotland to Chile, Cuba to Hawaii, Malta to Vietnam. The show was a resounding success, receiving a four star review in the Evening Standard, a notice in the Daily Telegraph and was Pick of the Week in the Guardian Guide exhibitions listing.


David Thurston  has exhibited at

Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.
Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong.
Seeds of Change, Oxo Gallery,  South Bank, London.
Waterloo Gallery, London,
Oxo Gallery, South Bank, London.
Royal West of England Academy, Bristol.
Summer Exhibition 2008, Royal Academy of Arts, London. Two photographs selected and hung, one sold (£950).

Invited speaker in  the 2008 Ways With Words Literary Festival, Dartington Hall, Devon. (DVD available) and featured artist at the Dartington Cider Press Centre.


Competitions

2006  runner-up, £10,000 Observer newspaper international food photography competition (total entry:7,000)

2009, finalist in  Royal Horticultural Society-sponsored  International Garden Photographer of the Year award. Three pictures in the final shortlist (total entry: 19,000).




David Thurston  is offering  his work as:

Chromium pigment ink prints on archival  quality  fibre-based paper, two principal image sizes:

40 cm x 26.5 cm
30 cm x 20 cm

Note: Size refers to image window in an archival quality conservation  board mount which is ready to place into a standard size picture frame.


They are available  framed or unframed.

Every print is signed and numbered in verso in limited editions of 12 or 25.


 Thurston’s photographs, during recent exhibition, prompted this comment from Dr. Claudia Steinfels, Managing  and  Senior  Director, Sotheby's-Zurich:  “Some day we will sell your photos at huge prices.”

I am delighted that two of my photographs were selected to hang in the Royal Academy of Arts summer exhibition, the largest open show of contemporary art in the world.
I am even more delighted that one of the pictures was bought for £950.
From an entry of more than 10,000 only about 500 works, mostly paintings, are chosen from submissions by non-Academician members of the public.
So, indeed, it is a rare honour and very thrilling: an ambition formed when I was 18 years old. This was my first try.
The summer exhibition, which has been held annually since 1768, ran for three months at Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1. It is estimated that some 300,000 visitors walked through the galleries.
http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/

In conjunction with Ways With Words, a selection of my photographs will be on display and for sale at the Cider Press Centre, Dartington from 11 July to 6 August.
www.dartingtonciderpress.co.uk