Tom Hunter
Tom Hunter is an artist and photographer, who is living and working in London and has won many awards, a mentionable award being the Rose Award for Photography, at the Royal Academy of London. Hunter is a professor of Photography at the London College of Communications and the University of the Arts in London.
Tom Hunter's work has been displayed in exhibitions both nationally and internationally, within group and solo exhibitions. Some the mentionable shows that Tom Hunter has been involved in include ‘Another story, Photography from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm Sweden, A Place for Us in the Serpentine Gallery in the UK, Life and Death in Hackney in the National Gallery in Washington D.C and Seduced by Art in the National Gallery in the United Kingdom.
Tom graduated from the London College of Printing in the year 1994 and studied an MA in the Royal College of Art. In 1996 Tom Hunter’s series ‘Travellers’ achieved the Photography Prize by Fuji film. In 1998 his photograph ‘Woman Reading a Possession Order’ won the Photographic Portrait Award from the National Portrait Gallery and in 2006 Tom Hunters series ‘Living in Hell and Other Stories’ enabled him to become the first and only artist to have a photography show by himself at the National Gallery in London. Tom Hunter's work 'The Ghetto' is now on permanent display in the Museum of London.
“The Travellers series was taken over a two-year period in which time I was living and travelling in Double Decker bus I had bought with a friend. During this time we travelled in Europe from Portugal in the West to The Czech Republic in the East. At this time there was an underground techno sound system movement travelling in Europe putting on free parties and festivals.” Tom Hunter.
Tom Hunters series ‘Travellers is a documentation of his friends and the traveller community throughout Europe whilst travelling to different raves and festivals. The photographs are portraits of people within their converted motorhomes. The images are a way of expressing a positive perception of the culture as the media were always projecting negative images and stories about the culture.
"The pictures I took during this period are of my friends and fellow travellers, in different parts of Europe as they travelled between festivals and raves. The spaces are their homes, vehicles recycled into new travelling homes, old lorries, buses and coaches. They were meant to be an antidote to all the very negative images that were being published in the press, who like the Government were very anti this D.I.Y. culture. The images in the press at that time were nearly always in black and white and very grainy, making the subjects into victims of society or criminals and other than the viewer.” Tom Hunter.
Tom Hunter creates bright and colourful images to counteract the negative percpretive that society has on the traveller community.
“My pictures are very colourful and try to show the humanity and the dignity of the subjects. By working with a large format camera and tripod, my subjects become collaborators in the artistic process. They had a say in the way they were viewed by the outside world, hopefully changing the way they are perceived in society.”
The above image is an image I took of one of my best friends, sat on my mums bed in her caravan, making a smoke on a 'Easy way to stop smoking' book' which I thought was a good moment to capture, its pretty ironic to say the least. Although it is in black and white, it reminded me of Tom Hunters series 'Travellers'. It reminded me of his work because he captures portraits of people in the comfort of there motorhomes and although this was not her home but my mums she is still part of the family, to me that is the similar resemblance. Tom Hunter captures people within a community and I feel I have taken much inspirations from this.
To me Hunters work is beautiful, I love the bright colours and the connections he has with his subjects. I can personally relate to Tom Hunters experiences as when I was a child I grew up living within a community, I lived on a traveller site with my mum and brother. We lived on all different types of vehicles throughout the time we were living this way, we were always on the move, it was an amazing experience. We even went travelling around Spain and France for about 6 months, where found other people who were also living the communal lifestyle, we met some incredible people along the way, part of me sometimes wishes I had been older and interested in photography at the time as I feel it would have made a beautiful project. We were homeschooled until I was eleven and my brother was nine when we had decided we wanted to go to school and we moved to a little town called Caerphilly which is near Cardiff.
I also have an understanding of what it feels like to feel like the whole outside world, the rest of society look at you in negative way. We used to get stared at when we went to the shops because we looked a bit different. The media would sometimes post articles and images of the site where we had been living after evicting us before we had even cleaned up, where we would then be labelled as disrespectful. We used to wake up to eviction letters on our doors, it would be sad because we had found a place that felt like home.
I have taken inspiration from Tom Hunters work, last year I wrote my dissertation about him and how the Criminal Justice Bill had had an effect on his work. Since then I have loved the idea of creating a body of work which shows this culture from a different perspective, from a positive view. That is why I am creating a video which is going to have positive stories, events and statements about the free party scene within it, so that my audience can see it from a different light. Although I mainly want to show the positive side, I do want to show some of the police brutality because the media can some times not show the full stories, so I thought it was important to show this message as well. I am capturing images from within my friend circle and how we have become a community, music and parties have been a part of my culture all of my life, my mum used to take me to parties and I loved it, I would run around as free and happy as I could be, I was one at my first Glastonbury, I lived on a traveller site for my whole childhood, a sense of community is important to me and free parties help me feel like I am part of something.
Images and information sourced: http://www.tomhunter.org/travellers/
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