Tom Hunter Photography · Thursday February 23, 2006
Tom Hunter currently has a substantial exhibition at the National Gallery, showing his large-scale photographs. Photography in major galleries is increasing, but still relatively rare and correspondingly interesting. His work got a negative appraisal by the Sunday Times, where a critic objected to what he called the cut and paste aesthetic you can also identify in other areas of cultural life. It’s part of the ‘dumbing down’ of culture many people have decried, which I agree with, where cheap tactics and formulaic repetition substitutes for artistic talent and originality. You see it in music, in TV, and in art. However I disagree that Hunter’s photography has that kind of ethos, or aesthetic or philosophical effect. I don’t think he’s any kind of genius, someone like Bill Viola to some extent does the same thing and more effectively, but he’s interesting nonetheless.
So what does he do? He takes classical paintings as inspiration for photographic interpretation. Barmaid at the Folies-Bergere becomes a barmaid in a Hackney pub; a Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia becomes a young woman floating in a nondescript river in a scruffy urban area that’s the nearest open space Hackney residents have, where you can find bushes, grass, and trees. The Ophelia photo is my favourite; I find it has a curious and interesting aesthetic effect. The romance and sentiment of the earlier work still lives in the contemporary image, and this remediation invites some interesting questions. What was the theme or message of the Pre-Raphaelite painting, and was there anything there that is relevant today? Women have always been associated with the earth, their bodies being a source of nourishment and reproduction. As funeral words tell us we can expect ‘ashes to ashes’ and ‘dust to dust, as the finality of our existence. Ophelia drowning in the pool is a return to earth – or in this case water – and the episode in the Shakespearian play is a heart-breaking moment, with the full stature of tragedy.
Hunter’s not mythological or philosophical; he doesn’t appear to justify or explain his work in anything beyond basic terms. One of his photos shows a naked ‘erotic dancer’ he’d met in Australia lying on the floor in a sleazy club, with a pose reminiscent of a classical nude. She’s being watched by others and this is – as hunter says in the 20 minute video accompanying the exhibition – the reason for the image: portraying the way men look at women. He has an art school background, and presumably read and appreciated John Berger’s book Ways Of Seeing in which precisely that theme is articulated, in relation to art.
The Ophelia photo is a conjunction from several sources, but is not merely – as the Times said – a cut and paste work devoid of any greater significance. All art ‘remediates’, by re-presenting something in an alternate form, and while some art exploits this in the most facile and superficial way – pile the contents of your kitchen into expensive gallery real estate and suddenly it’s ‘art’ – this is not what Hunter does. The Ophelia image comes from Shakespeare, who could well have derived her from some other source, as he often did; the Pre-Raphaelite painting adds further dimensions to the situation, and then finally you have the urban sprawl of Hackney. Most important though, is the overall aesthetics of his photograph: his model is appropriately fragile and pretty, wearing not a flowing frock but ubiquitous blue jeans. On the skyline of the image you can see a mast aerial, and just discern the tops of typically suburban houses. On the right of the photo you see a bridge and while you cannot see a railway line, it’s a quintessential railway bridge. All the signifiers suggest urban waste-area, the antithesis of romanticism. And finally, possibly most importantly, the title for this work is The Way Home (2000), which refers to the death of a young woman reported in the local Hackney press – the other influence for his artistic work. Cotton (2004) suggests that
When historical visual motifs are used in a contemporary photographic subject….they act as a confirmation that contemporary life carries a degree of symbolism and cultural preoccupation parallel with other times in history, and art’s position of being a chronicler of contemporary fables is asserted (55).
Hunter is a storyteller, using dramatic Hackney Gazette headlines blended with classical imagery and scenes from urban East London. However all of his could be merely intellectual, and correspondingly vacuous, if it weren’t for his skilful photographic execution. The Way Home is a beautiful composition, with the components of distant suburbia, bridge, pool, figure and – most importantly – a display of flowers on the overhanging bushes, dropping their petals into the water. Ophelia’s body is metamorphosing into nature, and the flowers represent regenerative power and thus continuing life. This Romantic idea is achieved within a subtle but obviously modern context, and a scruffy one, which is temporarily imbued with a poetic meaning. The effect is curiously satisfying because on the one hand the poetic ideas are clearly evoked, and on the other hand it occurs within an urban context devoid of all poetry, magic and meaning. Suburbia contains romance, and romance contains suburbia, in terms of an interplay that is more holistic than the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, because it is not Romantic escapism: rather, it operates within a recognisably mundane environment.
References
Cotton, Charlotte, 2000: The Photograph As Contemporary Art
Hi I am writing a dissertation on photographer recreating art work, concentration on the works of Tom Hunter and Mario Sorrenti. Any opinion on the following would be a great help.
Why Tom Hunter decided to recreate paintings?
If the work is any less his as the original idea’s were taken from other works of art?
If the fact that he has recreated these paintings, and is the only photographer to exhibit in Londons National Gallery a step close to photography becoming an undisputed art?
If Yes then has Tom Hunter Had a hand in this/ If no then what has Hunter acheived with these images.
Many thanks anything will be welcome.
Drew
— Drew · Feb 27, 02:04 PM · Drew">§
Hi Drew.
I think the answer to why he did it should really be addressed to him, although you may be able to research this and get some clues. As I recall, he had an art more than a photography background and in that respect, the same as with Jeff Wall, his work is arguably more ‘art’ than ‘photography’. Although you would have to qualify that and explain it, it’s a coherent proposition: they are two different cultures, which certainly intersect, but not entirely. And one difference for example, is between what Cartier-Bresson called the decisive moment and the more extended and developed process of art-making. Some people, for example David Hockney, have tried to say ‘art’ is superior because of this. Which is nonsense: they do different things, and photography can and does do things which painting for example cannot. But – and this is where it gets specific to both Hunter, Wall, and also Bill Viola – if you create work with an extended, long-term, more directorial approach, then this arguably fits the domain of art more than photography. A Hunter and a Wall photo is like a stage set, a piece of theatre, and it’s an extended process to create it (I don’t know about Sorrenti but will check him out – sounds interesting). So it’s an extended process, just like painting, and the fact that the medium is film rather than a brush is perhaps incidental.
Questions about authorship, derivation, and artistic authenticity are quite formulaic – I wouldn’t dwell on them, if I were pursuing this topic. It’s been going on for decades, for example, with Shakespeare: students are suprised to discover that he got a lot of his material from other sources, sometimes just rewriting stories and making no attempt to disguise it. Does that matter? – well if you consider that Shakespeare is one of the greatest writers ever, the answer is no.
There’s a book called Remediation that considers this topic in a wider sense, which I think is the more interesting approach to adopt – it’s a topic that needs updating in contemporary terms in our media saturated, digital, internet, and indeed photographic society. And that’s what the book does. I’d also advise you refer to Walter Benjamin and his concept of “aura” in relation to authenticity and artistic value. Basically, he said, if art can be and is easily reproduced, it loses its aura and thus its value – and photography is the pre-eminent tool to do this. So with Hunter for example, if you possessed his negatives you could create your own Tom Hunter art work to adorn your home – and it would be identical. But interestingly, although you know he’s working in photography this constant nagging question about reproduction and associated value doesn’t, I think, really occur to you. It’s as if his extended creative process has invested some aura in his work, the corollary being that Benjamin’s remarks concerned not so much the technical medium – which is how he usually gets construed – but rather, the background process associated with different media.
Hunter, of course, takes it a stage further. His work is a reproduction of a reproduction and whether you find it correspondingly dilute or not, is essentially a subjective matter but one that can be grounded in a substantiated argument. Personally, I like it. I don’t like reproduction for its own sake; I find that a sterile, facile, and ultimately rather boring project. But that’s not what Hunter does: firstly, because his work rests on an accomplished aesthetic – it looks beautiful – and secondly, because he updates and translates an older story into a modern and unexpected scenario. For example, he uses an ‘old master’ painting depicting the imminent homelessness of a peasant (if I recall correctly), and transposes that into an image of a modern woman reading an eviction letter. The question then is: what is the link, and how do we understand it in ahistoric terms? – being ‘ahistoric’ is not a fashionable academic strategy but it is, as far as I’m concerned, a valid approach. It doesn’t, as I think most academics would argue, constitute a non-critical viewpoint; rather, it’s a different viewpoint with a different rationale.
Finally, the fact that the National Gallery showed his work is indeed interesting. I don’t know if they’ve exhibited much photography but I suspect not. What this suggests is, they valued his work because it made direct reference to the genre of painting, with which they are essentially more concerned. Can’t remember now – but I think they had some of the paintings that Hunter refers to, and if they didn’t they certainly cited them underneath each of Hunter’s images. Any major photo exhibition in a major gallery is a major accomplishment; although in this case, it’s not such a concerted achievement because it still fits the traditional-art ethos of most international galleries. Photography has always had only a borderline ‘artistic’ status, and the Hunter exhibition was certainly an achievement, but only in this qualified sense. I doubt if it signifies a significant change in attitude. Indeed, you could argue that the exhibition was in part an educational project teaching people to appreciate the old paintings by illustrating them with contemporary situations. That would be an interesting question to put to Hunter himself: how do you understand the fact that your photography was shown in one of the most famous establishment art galleries in the world?
— James Lomax · Feb 27, 03:59 PM · James Lomax">§
Hi. I interviewed Tom Hunter a couple of weeks ago because I’m doing Art A level and I have to produce a written piece. Email me at raphael.odcv@gmail.com if you want to know what he said. Just to correct one of the things said above, he never did art before he started photography. He started photography through an evening class and progressed from there.
— Raph · Mar 8, 04:07 PM · Raph">§
Hi just to let you know the Royal Photographic Society is running a series of events and talks on The Real Thing? Staging, Manipulation and Photographic Truth – Tom will be taking part and talking about his work. Please see the link below. www.rps.org
— Liz Williams · Apr 7, 10:47 AM · Liz Williams">§
do you know what camera Hunter uses to take a photograph called Eve of the Party any help would be very nice
thank you
— william hughes · Jan 29, 12:08 PM · william hughes">§