Tom Hunter (artist)

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Tom Hunter (born 1965) is a London-based British artist working in photography and film. His photographs often reference and reimagine classical paintings. He was the first photographer to have a one-man show at the National Gallery, London.[1]

Hunter has shown work internationally in exhibitions, his work is held in a number of public collections and he has had four books published. He has won various awards including an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society.

Life and work[edit]

Hunter was born in Bournemouth, UK. He studied at the London College of Printing[2] and gained an MA from the Royal College of Art in London.[2]

His work has specialised in documenting life in Hackney, depicting local issues and sensationalist news headlines with compositions borrowed from the Old Masters.[3] For instance, his photograph of a squatter, Woman Reading a Possession Order, references Johannes Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window.[2] This photograph won the Kobal Photographic Portrait Award in 1998.[3][4][5] Of the photograph, which was shot with a large-format camera and printed using the Ilfochrome process, Hunter said:

I just wanted to take a picture showing the dignity of squatter life – a piece of propaganda to save my neighbourhood....The great thing is, the picture got a dialogue going with the council – and we managed to save the houses.[2]

While praising both the National Gallery exhibition as a whole and several of the photographs within it, Tim Adams criticized a staged photograph, comparing it unfavorably with the work of Richard Billingham or Graham Smith.[3]

In 2010 Hunter screened A Palace for Us, a film he made about the elderly residents of public buildings in Woodberry Down, Manor House, London. Jonathan Jones described it as a 'magical' work of contemporary art that chronicled the postwar ambition to provide housing for the working class.[6]

He works at the Photography and the Archive Research Centre in London.[citation needed]

In 2019 Hunter showed a series of photographs at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, of taxi drivers from various other countries that had made Hastings their home, along with works from the museum's collection.[7][8]

Books[edit]

  • Factory Built Homes: Holly Street Estate 1968-1998. Holly Street Public Arts Trust, 1998. ISBN 978-0953321506.
  • Tom Hunter. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2003. ISBN 978-3-7757-1277-4. Edited by White Cube, texts by Michael Bracewell and Paul Shepheard, essays by Jean Wainwright.
  • Tom Hunter: Living in Hell and Other Stories. Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press; London: National Gallery, 2005. ISBN 9781857093315.
  • The Way Home. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2012. ISBN 978-3-7757-3456-1.
  • Le Crowbar. Stockport: Here Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-9574724-5-7. Edition of 1000 copies.

Exhibitions[edit]

Awards[edit]

Collections[edit]

Hunter's work is held in the following public collections:[citation needed]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "Tom Hunter". The Daily Telegraph. 10 September 2010. ISSN 0307-1235. Retrieved 16 February 2019 – via www.telegraph.co.uk.
  2. ^ a b c d Photographer Tom Hunter's best shot, The Guardian, 4 November 2009
  3. ^ a b c d e Adams, Tim (11 December 2005). "The face is familiar ..." The Guardian. Retrieved 14 October 2018.
  4. ^ Life through a lens, Royal College of Art biography
  5. ^ From High Art to High Rise: Making Modern Masterpieces Archived 2007-06-08 at the Wayback Machine, National Gallery
  6. ^ Tom Hunter: A Palace for Us – review, The Guardian, 9 December 2010
  7. ^ "You talkin' to me? The taxi drivers of Hastings – in pictures". The Guardian. 8 January 2019. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 16 February 2019 – via www.theguardian.com.
  8. ^ a b "Tom Hunter / A Journey Home 09 February 2019 - 02 June 2019". Hastings Museum and Art Gallery. Retrieved 16 February 2019.
  9. ^ "Tom Hunter - MoMA". The Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved 18 May 2023.

External links[edit]

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