Michel Hurst’s Impassioned Vision of Mexico

The late photographer Michel Hurst happily endured what most of us might consider suffering. In his adventurous youth, he rode a rented bicycle a thousand miles across India. For a spell, he posted up in a commune in the South of France that didn’t have electricity or running water. He once lived in a cave in the Canary Islands for four months, naked, like a hermit chasing the beatific vision. He hitchhiked across the Sahara Desert, twice.

His ability to endure might, in a perverse way, have been a gift from his father, who, by Hurst’s account, treated him cruelly. From an early age, it was clear that Hurst was gay, and some of the cruelty undoubtedly sprang from his father’s homophobia. At six, he begged his parents for a doll for Christmas. This was out of the question for Hurst’s father, though his grandmother interceded on his behalf and was able to negotiate a diplomatic solution: a less offensive paper doll. When Hurst, a voracious reader who claimed to have read Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Nausea” when he was ten, told his father that he wanted to become a writer, his father responded that it was “a job for fags.”

“Mexico City, 2015”“Mexico City, 2019”Hurst didn’t become a writer, but he fashioned himself into the kind of character that a writer might wish they had imagined: an astute antiquarian, a swashbuckling adventurer, a pioneering tastemaker, a lover, and, periodically, a photographer. In typically defiant fashion, he also realized his father’s fears. His first serious photographic foray, undertaken in the nineteen-seventies, produced a vast collection of elegant, self-assured male nudes, some of which made their way into the pages of the French gay magazine Gai Pied.