Tom Hunter

Living in Hell and Other Stories

Tom Hunter is a storyteller. Coming from a traveller background, his formal schooling ceased in his mid-teens and did not start again until he studied A-Level Photography when he was nearly thirty. He is now one of contemporary photography's most innovative practitioners.

Hunter is currently (December 2005) making history as the first ever photographer to have an exhibition at the National Gallery, London. Having won the John Kobal Photographic Portrait prize in 1998 and completed a project based on Pre-Raphaelite paintings called Life and Death in Hackney, he was invited by the curator of contemporary art at the National, Colin Wiggins, to stage an exhibition based on Old Masters, including Vermeer.

Vermeer is rumoured to have used a camera obscura to form the basis of his paintings, which is a neat parallel with Hunter using his camera as the basis for his storytelling. He takes well-known paintings, such as Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) or Velasquez's Venus at her Mirror* and interprets them as scenes from contemporary life in his local environment, Hackney. His subjects are often the disenfranchised, the dispossessed and those living on the margins of society, which makes his photographs overtly political. The images which result from this approach are not mere pastiche of the original paintings - they are far more than that - offering a fresh, contemporary interpretation of age-old themes.

*Tom Hunter isn't the only one to have re-interpreted this image: Andre Maier