An Expat Photographer Seduced by Mexican Ritual

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.

Hurst went on to become a prominent dealer of mid-century furniture, a period that his partner in life and in business, Robert Swope, described as a “thirty-year detour” in his photography career. But, after the couple retired and migrated south to Mexico City, Hurst dove back into photography with gusto, until his death, from cancer, in 2023.