Tom Hunter – Case Study

Tom Hunter is a renowned British Photographer who is currently based in East London. Hunter was born in Dorset in 1965. In 1980 when he was 15 years old, he left school and began to work on a farm for a year and later moved onto work for the  Forestry Commission in Dorset. In 1986 Tom Hunter moved to Hackney and began work as a Tree Surgeon. 4 years later in 1990, he attended A-Level Photography evening classes at Kingsway College in London.

Hunter is best known for his re-staging of historical tableaux portraits and making them more contemporary and fitting his narratives. Below is an example of this. Tom Hunter draws inspiration from Victorian paintings and  Dutch Renaissance and Pre-Raphaelite master painters. His re-creation of the Ophelia painting shows a young girl on her walk home coming back from a rave and falling into a slippery canal area in an desolate industrialized area.The Walk Home – Tom Hunter

                        Unheralded Stories

Unheralded Stories by Tom Hunter is a series of photographs which depict the folklore and myths that were built up around his community and surroundings in Hackney over the past twenty-five years. The photographs reference historical tableaux paintings to create striking mythical images which celebrate life by transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. There are 10 photos in this series, these are the ones I am drawn to the most.

In Anchor and Hope, 2009. It is clear to see the reference from Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, 1948 it depicts a memory of pitched battles with the council as squatters organized a self-supporting community in a Clapton estate bordering Springfield Park.

Christina’s World , Andrew Wyeth, 1938

Tom Hunter Videos