This unique tome is the evolution of a project that began as an assignment for The Independent newspaper, when eminent poet John Fuller agreed to write about Magnum photographer David Hurn's images of Wales, 'as long as the captions could be poetry'. So that is exactly what he did: Fuller wrote original poems to tell a story about the images opposite - and it really works. Fifty of Hurn's duotone reportage images have been chosen, ranging from hen nights to battle reenactments and local tragedies, but astutely we are not told what the pictures are. All we have to go on are Fuller's poems, which probe the emotions and mood captured by the image. Ultimately, this tells a fuller story (no pun intended) than any conventional caption ever could. Jeff Meyer Amateur Photography

After initial discussion, included in the fascinating introduction, they concur that the specificity of a poem can only follow on that of the image, not the reverse. Either way, this brave volume offers a proud collaboration between two masters of their chosen arts.

Amanda Hopkinson, The Independent

This impressive collection contains 66 duotone pictures by the magnum photographer David Hurn for which John Fuller has written 50 accompanying poems. Hurn has been consistently photographing and exploring Welsh life since the 1970's and this book grew out a 1989 newspaper project for which Fuller was commissioned to write pieces responding to Hurn's images. The relationship between poem and photo is varied and flexible throughout. The opening piece, for example, is placed between three separate pictures. The first photograph is of a party of schoolchildren preparing to enter the Big Pit Coal Museum at Blaenavon. Fuller responds by giving voice to the sounds experienced on such a journey rather than to the imagery - "She hears only the steady drip / Of the stopped vein, the voice of the mine / Which speaks of profit and fellowship, / The cough, the dark and doubled spine." Another of the three accompanying photos presents the very different mage of two sheep taking shelter from the rain in a narrow hut on Mynydd Eppynt. But here Fuller's wit, his visual sense and his use of comparison transform our experience of the photograph - "And sheep are waiting in a lift / As though they might descend again". These two lines change the image and bring it closer to the subject of the first photograph, the poem standing as an open, flexible link between them. One of the most successful pairings of the book is inspired by another photograph of a sheep, newly shorn. leaping into the air on a sunny day in Snowdonia. The sun, whose intense light emphasises the shadow thrown by a fence across the floor, is compared to a photographer momentarily creating "the sudden illusion of a gate / Laid out in yard-light and concrete'. But it's the poem's final lines describing the bounding sheep that capture Fuller's persistent delight and adeptness in description and that send us hurrying back to the photograph to see it afresh - "Each clipper-nick like a raw hyphen / In the tense of the belly, and the heart pounding." Charles Bainbridge, The Guardian, 2 Oct 2010

Writing the Picture presents a fresh collaboration between image and word, and a new departure for the ever enterprising publishing house, Seren. What is new is that Hurn's documentation of Welsh urban and rural life stretches back over forty years, and his collaboration with Oxford poet John Fuller, over almost twenty. David Hurn is unusual among Magnum photographers in travelling the globe less, in order to keep his focus on his adoptive homeland of Wales. Fuller, an Emeritus Professor in his home city of Oxford with a clutch of important literary prizes, remains more an outside observer, and - the reader senses - has learnt of Wales more through Hurn's eyes than his own. He admits of being "bowled over" at his first sight of the images, so sumarising a principal difference between the collaborators. While photography serves to frame external reality, poetry's first allegiance is to the inner world of the imagination that inventively reframes experience. All in all, this compilation offers a rewarding interplay of image and imagination, picture and text. Like reading a children's storybook, the eye is drawn first to the former and to the latter for further illumination. Amanda Hopkinson, 'Planet', Issue 200

The book's poetic highlight accompanies a picture of a young girl dressing up in wedding gear and holding daisies. It has the unsentimentality, magic and timelessness of great folk rhyme and song, and it enriches the photograph that brought it into being. At such moments one wonders if perhaps John Fuller could prove to be the popular poet of the age after all. William Wootten, TLS

Tim Liardet is impressed by a new collaboration of photography and poetry by David Hurn and John Fuller This is another Seren book of superb production values. It contains no fewer than one hundred and eleven duotone photographs by the Welsh photographer David Hurn and a complementary number of poems by John Fuller in response to them. The ekphrastic force comes from the poet responding to image, rather than the other way round; Ted Hughes did the same when Fay Godwin offered up such a batch of memorably dark, suggestive photographs, and Remains of Element was the outcome. In Writing the Picture the photographs - halftone superimposed on halftone - evoke their peculiar sense of verite and the spontaneously stopped. Hurn clearly takes his camera with him wherever he goes in order to curry his flaneuring yen - a child in mid-air, as if in mid-flight, Nijinsky-like, leaping over a pole; a newly-shorn sheep also leaping in mid-air, similarly held; an old man's face obscured by a plume of his own cigarette smoke; three living men stood by a plate of glass window through which four dummies seen to survey the street; a male stripper swinging his meat before a room of women; the street-player playing his accordion in the street, beside his old suitcase containing a scatter of coins; a drama group in extempore; two horses about to mate:a middle-aged woman about to cross the road, holding a single rose; the brilliant artistry of the arc-welder; the steelworks at night. And so forth. What seems to draw Hurn is the momentaneous - the fragile microseconds and nanoseconds which alter everything and which photography can rescue from oblivion, the [often] minor human event about to happen in sequential time, or actually in the process of happening. All in all, this is a formidable array of photographs. The fun starts in this book when the images are cast into a new aesthetic space by Fuller's formally elegant poems. It is entirely fitting that a humane visual artist should turn to an equally humane poet for language. Fuller's poems are classic examples of ekphrasis - they continue the work of interpretation the photographer began. Photographers often claim not to interpret, merely to bear witness; but the decision to take the shot, from that angle, in that light and of that subject is itself an interpretative, if not political, act. Fuller understands this only too well and time and time again takes the artistic endeavor a significant stage further. He is one of those rare poets who gets better and better. Clarity and elegance are his trademarks. He reminds us that formal discipline needs to be carried into vers libre such as this; however loosely he writes, the formal discipline is always there like an instinct in his fingertips. Confronted with so wide an array of classy duotones Fuller shows great tact, even humility, and never over poeticises; he allows the image to be itself and the accompanying poem a version of it, an aesthetic partner than a translation. In the splendid introduction to this book - comprised of a conversation between poet and photographer - Hurn says '...the best photography not only reproduces the visible but also makes visible the unseen'. And that's what Fuller seems to be doing with his spare, clear-minded and gracious poems..[.]. Hurn and Fuller have known each other for twenty years or more and this collaboration is enriched by that knowledge. Of all the many virtues their project possesses the primary one is an overwhelming sense of mutual trust. Tim Liardet, New Welsh Review, Winter 2010

Writing the Picture, by contrast, is much more a photographer's book. Larger, glossier, there are 66 duotone images here, and 50 poems. The book evolved from a previous assignment for the Independent, in which Fuller agreed to write about Hurn's photographs, 'as long as the "captions" could be poetry'. Such poetic captions, Fuller suggests in the introduction, are quite different from the usual ones, which merely offer a stage of interpretation beyond the title: 'An accompanying poem supplies a voice which may only be implicit in the photograph...there is a difference between the poetic voice of the photograph'. It is this ventriloquism that Fuller has clearly found liberating. Hurn's photographs are black and white, more people than McBeaths (indeed, they allowed me to see how opaque McBeath's images are in their own right), full of narrative - and very Welsh. Fuller's accompanying poems are open hearted (even, at times, naïve) in providing voices for black-faced miners, leaping sheep and children playing football against a back drop of factory chimneys. There are grittier and more complex picture/poems here too. Brides in full Indian dress smile beneath a kitsch oil painting of not just one but three blow-dried Princess Diana's; heroin addict shoots up on the floor of a public toilet '(Don't look at me, don't look. This is a dirty place' begins Fuller's companion sonnet). My favourite image from Writing the Picture is of a large battered photograph of a suave Dylan Thomas, placed on top of an old fireplace against spectacularly dated wallpaper - a welcome moment of almost Muldoonian self consciousness.

By coincidence the Hurn/Fuller collaboration also features a photograph of not one but two Classical statues wrapped in polythene. This not only makes me wonder whether this is the kind of thing people photograph a lot, but provides a reminder of something the photographer and poet have eclipsed, by sleight of hand, in stressing the primary of the photographs. This is 'ekphrasis', term for the dramatic description of a visual work. It's not rare, in fact it derives from Greek and is thus very, very old.

Leontia Flyn, Source (The Photographer Review) Issue 65