Capturing the magnetic pull of North Carolina’s Outer Banks

Where Is Home? — In the final instalment of the series, David Alan Harvey explains how life in the Outer Banks informed his education as a young photographer – and why he’ll always come back to the place he’s proud to call home.

Despite a career spent shooting stories all over the world, David Alan Harvey always finds himself being pulled back to his home in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Having first fallen in love with the camera as a 14-year-old, Harvey – a full member of Magnum since 1997 – would spend his days taking pictures from his front porch, never drifting further than a few blocks from his house.

As a teen, his immediate environment was all he really had to photograph. Though he was avidly curious about the rest of the world (a world he’d eventually travel), home was where he’d form his skills – and there was nothing else like it.

“I really am kind of a homebody,” he explains. “In other words, I travel because that’s where the stories are, but I probably wouldn’t be much of a traveller if I were not a photographer!”

Today, he lives just 60 miles north of the home in which he grew up. So, when it came to his part in Magnum’s eponymous project this year, there was only ever going to be one option: David Alan Harvey quite literally stayed at home.

The subsequent photos – interweaving colourful scenes with black and white shots – depict him and his family among the landscape of the Outer Banks, illustrating the part it plays in each of their lives.

Visible too is the magnetic pull that has always brought David back, demonstrating how the relationships he shares with home is entangled with his life in photography.

“The luckiest thing in my life is that home has never changed. I’m having the same dreams, hearing the same birds, smelling the same trees that I did when I was a kid.”

“My vision of home has not changed, nor has my vision of photography. I’m able to keep that naive enthusiasm for pictures and photography that whole time. When people ask me, ‘what did you accomplish?’, I’ll say, ‘I managed to keep my enthusiasm. I’ve got the same fire in the belly I always had.”