How Is The World?

Recent Acquisitions of Contemporary

Photography

March 9, 2013–May 26, 2013

http://www.corcoran.org/exhibitions/how-is-the-world

‘The Vale of Rest’, Tom Hunter

How Is the World? highlights a selection of photographs acquired by the Corcoran Gallery of Art over the past few years. The exhibition features works as varied as Paul Graham’s dramatic redefinition of street photography, Tom Hunter’s ’Vale of Rest’ portrait of inner city London life, Kate O’Donovan Cook’s unconventional self-portraiture, Edward Burtynsky’s striking depiction of the oil industry’s impact on the land, and Hank Willis Thomas’s exploration of the connections between spectacle and African American identity. Graham has said that he uses his camera to answer the question “How is the world?” Seen together, the works on view invite us to consider the wide-ranging issues addressed by photographers working today.

Corcoran Gallery of Art
Corcoran College of Art + Design
500 Seventeenth Street NW
Washington, DC 20006

http://www.mooseontheloose.net

16th of May 2013 7-9pm

All Welcome for this free event

Books by;

Tom Hunter, Stuart Griffiths, Chris Harrison, Grace Lau, David Moore and Marjolaine Ryley

Plus the latest issues of Photography & Culture

Bring your favourite glass, best glass prize awarded on the night by MacDonaldStrand and Gost

Shoreditch Town Hall

Council Chambers

380 Old St, London

EC1V 9LT

moose on the loose

18 May – 14 July 2013

Mission Gallery is very pleased to present the work of Tom Hunter, to coincide with Diffusion the Cardiff International Photography Festival, organised by Ffotogallery.

Mission Gallery, Gloucester Place Maritime Quarter,  Swansea, SA1 1TY
+44 (0) 1792 652016  info@missiongallery.co.uk

http://www.missiongallery.co.uk/exhibitions/new-work3/

Admission free
Open Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 5pm
Closed Mondays
Open Bank Holidays

Unheralded Stories
Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, a now deceased American politician, was fond of saying, “All politics is local.” The globalisation expressed in our moment of late Capitalism has changed nothing of this. The sources and inspiration for Tom Hunter’s new series of photographs are located in his own time, place and neighbourhood. This is Hackney in East London. The photographs he produces are a product of his experience of the world and they should not be seen or even appreciated – for all the grandeur of their art historical references to painting’s rich past – as independent of those social forces. The place and moment in which these photographs were conceived and made belong to Hunter but we are each part of this context as well.
For twenty years Tom Hunter has explored history, place and alternative ways of living in and occupying the urban environment. Continuing that project, his new series of ten paired pictures explore the small everyday stories that arrive without fanfare. Delivered as unannounced oral histories, such stories shape the social fabric of a community and lend colour to a locality. These allegorical reconstructions of stories, memories and myths map an urban psychogeography that encompasses experiences imaginatively scaled to the type of epic adventures that perhaps can only ever take place close to home. In these pictures the bounds of a London borough offer up a whole wider world and evoke images of lofty heavens, subterranean hells, verdant jungle, continental plains, mighty rivers and their attendant falls along the banks of the river Lea.
The restaging of historical painterly tableaux in a contemporary setting for which Hunter is perhaps best known is treated in these new works with a precise and focused attention to fragments or details of paintings containing an evocative gesture or specific painterly handling of the human form. Drawing from works by artists as diverse as Eugene Delacroix and Andrew Wyeth, Hunter’s focus is on the body as a vessel for and of storytelling. In Death of Coltelli, 2009, he draws on Delacroix’s mammoth tableaux Death of Sardanapalus, 1827 and reconfigures the lineaments in the depiction of an epic mythical tale to tell a story heard about the passing of an Italian immigrant grandmother who had founded a cafe on Amhurst Road. Hunter isolates the figure and form of a woman who has thrown herself onto Sardanapalus’ bed; her plaintive gesture, tousled hair and the colour of the bedspread is mirrored in the contemporary frame. Hunter’s photographs yield details of their own and the bedroom is marked by the faith and image of one who has passed. This left panel joins with a right structured entirely differently, though complementary in every case. The right panel of Death of Coltelli shows the interior of a chapel, which so happens to belong to St. Joseph’s Hospice on Mare Street in central Hackney. The uncanny stillness of each right panel to these ten diptychs owes something to the fact that Tom Hunter has shot these interiors using a pinhole camera fixed with a 5×4 back. The interior location shots represent the social staging, or setting – importantly without the players – against which is pinned the scenario set in the right panel.
In Anchor and Hope, 2009, the recognisable structure of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, 1948 yields up a memory of pitched battles with the council as squatters organised an autonomous and collectively self-supporting community in a Clapton estate bordering Springfield Park. As in many of these works, the action rises from the interstices between nature and the city. The right panel expressly offers the social stage from which the local culture and ordinary entertainments spring. One of the borough’s great eccentrics is memorialised in Mole Man, 2010 caressing the Irish immigrant figure of William Lyttle who spent forty years tunnelling beneath his home on Mortimer Road from a detail of Giordano’s Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1666. His was an ordinary life filled with ordinary labour for his kind and still he lived and laboured with invention and creativity. The subterranean panel is matched to a glowing pinhole image of Stoke Newington Town Hall laid out and ready for a tea dance in another age.
Politics are expressed through actions, hopes and desires that serve as a ground against which lives are positioned, located and lived at a collective, communitarian and individual level. We are linked as subjects by the forces and relations that organise and define the shape, tone, but so too the hopes and aspirations that comprise the place where we live. We constitute that place more so than the ground beneath our feet. Our stories recount adventures often close to home that bear the greatest impact on the shape of our lives and communities. All borders and boundaries are elastic and permeable. Think of your own position, place and moment. Then consider what you might do in and within to make something better, other or what has yet to come and be for yourself and others. For all the massive global, corporate, party political and economic forces that knock us each around and off kilter, we do well to remind each other that we are the actors and agents here. The stage on which we move begins already before but is as near as your own front door. And what lies beyond can be made and reshaped as never before. This is the subject of Tom Hunter’s art.
John Slyce

http://www.findingsbirmingham.co.uk

Findings

Many of the buildings I have photographed are monuments to our industrial past, showing us the fingerprints of working lives and the products that these endeavours have created and from them a way of life and culture. I have always been attracted to these shrines from a disappearing world, a world my grandfather was meshed to, with his engineering company in Birmingham. A world I have explored through photography in Hackney Wick, where the industrial landscape became a playground for the dispossessed, and is now reincarnated as an Olympic wonderland.

All these elements have aligned themselves in this photographic essay, connecting my history to my country’s and Birmingham to Hackney. In the same way Alexander Parkes of Birmingham invented Parkesine, the base material of my film and took it to Hackney Wick to be mass-produced, I now take my pinhole photography back in time to Birmingham, to illuminate and document this very special place.

Victoria and Albert Museum
The world’s greatest museum of art and design
Opening times
10.00 to 17.45 daily
10.00 to 22.00 Fridays

3 May 2013 – 12 January 2014
Room 38A
Free admission

Photography is widely associated with truthfulness yet it has also been employed throughout its history as a means of telling stories and evoking the imaginary. This display includes photographs by some of the most influential contemporary artists working in this vein, such as Tom Hunter, Gregory Crewdson, Duane Michals and Cindy Sherman, alongside examples by 19th-century practitioners including Julia Margaret Cameron, Clementina Lady Hawarden and Oscar Gustav Rejlander.

February 2013 Interviewed by Katy Barron

http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2013/02/the-way-home/

Tom Hunter recently met with Katy Barron to discuss Hunter’s newly published book The Way Home (Hatje Cantz, 2012) and his work within the recent National Gallery exhibition Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present.  Below, an excerpt of their conversation transcribed for Photomonitor details the background to several of Hunter’s most recent series.

 ——-

Katy Barron: Your new book includes images that I haven’t seen before, all of which are made using a pinhole camera. Can you explain your choice of the pinhole for these particular images of religious spaces and street markets in Hackney?

Tom Hunter: I suppose it’s just trying to create an atmosphere, and showing the opposite way of working, so you are just working very slowly and [the pinhole] collects rather than grabs. You can just put the pinhole down and it slowly absorbs the scene rather than grabbing and taking. I got a bored of ‘what lens have you got? How many megapixels have you got? How big’s your camera?’. This is just a lovely way of working with people as you have to get permission, you have to talk to people, to have dialogue. It absorbs and there isn’t anything fancy about it, it’s not about the product.

KB: The resulting image lacks the manic atmosphere [of the street market] and purifies it almost or distils it. They have a very painterly quality as the light and colour become extremely rich.

TH: I’m doing everything that you shouldn’t do and you’re told not to do as a photographer. Using the wrong type of film with the wrong type of lighting, doing overly long exposures for the film to cope with, not using the lens, not using the flash. If you read early books about photography they advise that you have to use the flash and particular film and filters and shorter exposures. Otherwise you get these strange hues and distortions around the edges.

KB: Presumably these are the effects that you are looking for in this work?

TH: Exactly – you don’t need any of those things. The image looks beautiful as it is. The irony is that this is how we see with our eye, and photography is made to try and escape all that, to make it very pure and this work is pure in a very different way.

KB: Are you being deliberately anarchic?

TH: Once you understand the rules of photography so well, through teaching and being part of it, you get bored of it. If you understand the rules they become very boring and then you are in a position to play with them and understand why they are there. Actually the rules are quite dull and when you break them you can do amazing things.

KB: To turn to your work that was recently in the National Gallery exhibition Seduced by Art. How far do you feel other photographers, apart from yourself, have made work that is so deliberately based upon paintings from the canon of Western art?

TH: All the great artists painted the Madonna and Child, the reclining nude etc from Leonardo to Picasso to Poussin, they all look back and use the same themes and the same pictures and make their own interpretations. For obvious reasons photography, especially in the 1960s with the advent of the 35mm cameras, tried to distance itself completely from the past. It was like a Communist revolution, stating ‘we don’t belong to the past and we have no relationship with it, and photography must be seen in its own right’. And they tried to sever the link, because photography in the 19th century was very much linked to painting, which they did very successfully. It came to a point in the 1990s when some practitioners became frustrated that photography could only be one way of looking at the world; 35mm hand-held. People began to question this and started looking back and re-interpreting photography so that it became more experimental.

KB: It seems to me that young photographers don’t position themselves within the history of art and don’t feel that they are part of a trajectory. I think that you do and are happy to use the past to inform the present in the creation of something very contemporary but few photographers are comfortable with that connection.

TH: There are a lot of photographers who are scared of the word ‘art’ or ‘artist’ and have taken up photography because it doesn’t have those pretentious connotations. There is an idea that art is un-masculine.

KB: But you are very happy to be associated with Art?

TH: Absolutely. I just see photography as another tool to express yourself and to represent the world around you. Artists have done it through cave painting etc and then the camera came along, then moving cameras came along, then video came along. To put photography in this small ghetto has always worried me. Photography to me is important. I love the medium, and it is unique in that it’s the only medium where everyone thinks it has a direct relationship to reality, an unfettered relationship. I believe that it has got an indexical link to reality in some respects but its always monitored and edited through the human mind and hand. Everyone thinks they can judge a photograph, take a picture, view a picture. You can take the best picture in the world as a five-year old kid. You can walk down the street, trip up, press a button and just in front of you there’s a policeman lying on top of someone with a knife in their throat. If the same person tried to accidentally make a sculpture or painting or to write about it, it would be very hard to do. So photography has some unique qualities, which I like to play around with, experiment with, think about.

KB: I wonder if Seduced by Art was an attempt by the National Gallery to engage a new audience with painting? One who would naturally dismiss the Old Masters as dull and not for them?

TH: Lots of people think the Old Masters are dull. When you go to the Gallery you’re not allowed to use your mobile phone, you can’t shout, kids aren’t allowed to run about – it becomes a very serious ordeal. Rather like going to a church where you have to bow to these great masters. When you look at something like a Caravaggio of someone being killed, the subject matter can get lost and the brushstrokes, colours or forms can take centre stage. You can forget that he [Caravaggio] killed. That this is a prostitute, that these people are starving to death. You can forget the context of the painting because of the way that it is situated. Whereas photography is often seen in magazines, it has a contemporary context to which people can easily relate. By bringing in contemporary work and issues to the National Gallery, a new context can be given to the old masters.

KB: Do you think that some of your subjects are dignified through being presented through the mirror of painting and are you happy for the parallels to be drawn so clearly?

TH: Yes, I want to give dignity to my subjects in the same way that the subjects of classical portrait painting were given dignity. But at the same time I am not trying to hide the reality of life. It is like a Brechtian device for me – show the stage and what you’re doing but you are still going to get lost in it. It is rather like going to the theatre where you can see the lights and the stage but its so absorbing that you forget about it but then you look up and remember that ‘this is just the theatre’ before becoming lost in it again. A lot of photography is a bit deceptive in the way that it pretends that it has no relationship to the past, that it is just mechanical reproduction and the photographer just happened to be there. There is some denial of photography as this true and honest instrument that walks on its own legs around town and takes pictures and the photographer doesn’t make any choices or edits or has any creative involvement at all.

KB: Finally, how did it feel for you to return to the National Gallery after your solo show there in 2006 – you have been on a long creative journey since then? 

TH: Many things had changed for the better since 2006. I’ve done a lot of new work and been more adventurous – making films, pinhole work, commissions, working with the Royal Shakespeare Company etc. In some ways my National Gallery show was a confused time, it was very overwhelming and it took me a while to move on from it. Some of the images depicted negative aspects of life, the pictures were about headlines; murder, rape and attacks and it was hard hitting. Whereas the shows I’ve done recently haven’t had that huge notoriety, they have challenged me in ways and moved my work forwards. So it was great to go back to the National Gallery in a completely new context.

Seduced by Art, Photography Past & Present

Features Tom Hunter’s ‘Death of Colotti’

Caixa Forum, Barcelona, Spain

From 22 February to 19 May

http://obrasocial.lacaixa.es/nuestroscentros/english/caixaforumbarcelona/seducedbyart_en.html

What is the connection between the great masterpieces of painting, the first photographs and the work  of some contemporary photographers? The exhibition shows the way in which the pioneers of photography adopted historical art as a point of reference and as a stimulus to their creativity. It also shows how today’s photographers take their inspiration from the same sources and rework the same themes, but by using new media that were unimaginable just a few years ago, and filtering them through a modern sensibility.

Photography first appeared in the 1830s, at a time when art was more accessible than ever before. Big exhibitions and public art galleries all helped to popularise the great works of painting and sculpture. With the aim of legitimising their art, photographers such as Roger Fenton, Julia Margaret Cameron, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson took well-known images as their point of reference. The public of the time thought that photography reproduced reality in an over-literal manner, far removed from the expressive, emotive synthesis achieved by paintings. But by looking closely at works of art, photographers gradually refined their perceptions and began to develop their own forms of expression. Nowadays, thanks to communication technologies, art can be found absolutely everywhere, but photographers no longer have to imitate or reproduce it relatively literally. They can borrow specific aspects from art works and play with the imaginary of the viewer and the role of the artwork in the cultural tradition, so as to create new meanings and excite new emotions.

CaixaForum Barcelona

Social and Cultural Centre

Death of Colotti

http://www.findingsbirmingham.co.uk/

Many of the buildings I have photographed are monuments to this industrial past, showing us the fingerprints of working lives and the products that these endveours have created and from them a way of life and culture. I have always been attracted to these shrines from a disappearing world, a world my grandfather was meshed too, with his engineering company in Birmingham. A world I have explored through photography in Hackney Wick, where the industrial landscape became a playground for the dispossessed, and is now reincarnated as an Olympic wonderland.

All these elements have aligned themselves in this photographic essay, connecting my history to my country’s and Birmingham to Hackney. In the same way Alexander Parkes of Birmingham invented Parkesine, the base material of my film and took it to Hackney Wick to be mass-produced, I now take my pinhole photography back in time to Birmingham, to illuminate and document this very special place.

Photograph of the Coffin works Birmingham

http://www.bootstrapcompany.co.uk/3_print_house_gallery

“These photographs are Earthly, here the word evokes the inter-relatedness of the environment to the life that takes place within it. A resolute acceptance of the cycles and seasons of na- ture. Birth and death. Physical human situations, stories, people and places in-between. At the same time an important link to the artist’s current concerns is that they are meditative. I have sought to express and explore a self-reflection and quiet- ness through which one might transcend the immediate realities, pressures and distractions of contemporary urban society.

The photographs are made with a pinhole cam- era. My choice to make these photographs with a pinhole camera is critical. It has implications on various levels not only for the construction of the image but also the construction of meaning or in- terpretation around the image. The pinhole cam- era is an arcane technology, the most rudimentary of interventions with allusions to the pre and early history of photography.The pinhole camera has no shutter. It makes no sound. Its mechanism;

the action of light ‘seeping in’ has the quality of absorbing not grabbing. The photographs remind us of the cultural and spiritual diversity to be found within our own local environs. It is impor- tant to find and interpret spaces removed from the increasingly pervasive commercialization and sanitization of my community through ubiquitous property development driven on by economic greed. These images thus talk of civic pride, com- munity, its spaces, history and how we fit into our our surroundings” – Tom Hunter www.tomhunter.org

22nd FEBRUARY – 25th MARCH 2013

The Print House Gallery is proud to present Public Spaces, Public Stages, a series photographs located in the London borough of Hackney.

A series of images of public spaces in Hackney, taken with a homemade large format pinhole camera that talk about the community spaces where the theatre of life is acted out, which make up a neighbourhood.

PRIVATE VIEW 21ST FEBRUARY 6-9 PM EXHIBITION OPEN DAILY: 9 – 5PM, MON-FRI

PRINT HOUSE GALLERY 18 ASHWIN STREET LONDON E8 3DL

020 7275 0825 HELLO@BOOTSTRAPCOMPANY.CO.UK