Interpreting the Old Masters

Thinking about the works of Tom Hunter and Jeff Wall

In December 2005 I went to see two photographic exhibitions in London. It was a tough choice: so many things going on and, of the three on the shortlist, Jeff Wall, Steve McCurry and Tom Hunter, McCurry lost out purely on the basis of his exhibition closing date - much later than the other two - thereby allowing future opportunities to visit.

The two exhibitions my companion and I elected to see were Jeff Wall's retrospective Photographs 1978-2004 at Tate Modern and Tom Hunter's Living in Hell and Other Stories at the National Gallery.

The choice of these two exhibitions was based on nothing less prosaic than the logistics of travel, but the combination of the two photographers' works proved to be a powerful and fortuitous one.

Tom Hunter lives in Hackney, London. After learning how the 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer became very insular in his approach to painting people in his home town of Delft, Hunter realised that he was doing something very similar in his adopted town of Hackney. He took as his starting point the headlines which so often appeared in his local newspaper, the Hackney Gazette. These headlines were sensational and often lurid, and lent themselves very well to Hunter's desire to interpret the paintings of the Old Masters in a contemporary way.

The most widely recognised of this series is probably 'Woman reading a Possession Order' for which he won the Kobal Photographic Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in 1998.

(C) Tom Hunter, all rights acknowledged

This photograph was based on Vermeer's 'Girl Reading at the Open Window'

In this work, as in many others, Hunter uses his reinterpretation of an Old Master to highlight contemporary issues; this particular one being about the plight of the homeless, vulnerable or financially insecure.

Jeff Wall too has used other artists' works as the basis for his own, and it is here that the uncanny synergy between the two photographers' exhibitions I saw on that visit to London becomes apparent.

Two interpretations, one source of inspiration

Tom Hunter took a similar approach with Edouard Manet's 'The Girl at the Bar at the Folies Bergere':

Hunter makes a very direct and easily discernible connection between Manet's original and his own photograph:

(C) Tom Hunter, all rights acknowledged

more on Hunter's photo

Jeff Wall, however, chose to reinterpret this image in a less obvious way:

Wall involves everyone in this image: the subject, the photographer and the viewer all have a part to play. The subject is looking at the viewer or... actually... not, as she's looking at the camera, but the mirror device has her with her back to the camera and the photographer who is also, (although it does not look so) staring, along with us, at the subject. From this interesting standpoint, the viewer is placed squarely in front of the camera, about to become the subject but in fact, on reflection (no pun intended) the viewer stands behind the camera (who can tell?) and might indeed become the camera. All very clever.

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