Reading the introduction to Tom Hunters book The Way Home similarities can be drawn between Alec Soth and himself, using a combination of Landscape and portraits both photographers relay a sense of place within their photographs.
Notes:
Notes:
- ‘making my journey’ - about place. - link to Soth, using a journey to ‘find’ photographs.
- Hackney is veneered with traces of a bygone era of grandeur, interwoven with people washed ashore, mixed up cultures and architecture, worlds within worlds; glimpses of a life.
- Influenced by Johannes Vermeer,
Tom is located in studio 13 and during his time in Ireland he has developed a project influenced by the sea and James Joyce’s Ulysses. The images shown are taken in different bathing locations around Dublin Bay and are all locations where Tom swam during his time in Ireland. The photographs are taken with a 4” x 5” pinhole camera.
Persons Unknown. Women reading a possession order.
Tom Hunter in conversation with Robert Elms. Notes:
- Our city - immediately about place. Portray and see our city in a way many don't. See the extraordinary beauty.
- Home is a theme in your work. Chronicling home. RE
- Moved into a squat, this is beautiful I've never lived in such a big house. I had to document it.
- Rose tinted glasses, always seen the beauty. I am a romantic.
- The pictures I want to make, I want to show the beautiful things.
- Frustration with the photographic medium, wasn't telling the people what I wanted to say.
- JEFF WALL
- Staged images
- We all believe we understand photography, we all have a connection. Our window into the 'real' world. The reality of it.
- Photography can it: meaning, do with it, place it in society, change meaning, represent people, propaganda, undermine, abuse people.
- Presenting stories RE
- Peeling an onion, take back the layers and it gets more and more interesting
- Direct references to Vermeer
- First layer is the beautiful picture, and then you have a message.
- Transparency on a lightbox are magical. Large 5x4 transparencies
- 5x4 makes everything slow down
- Lots of photography becomes similar, by printing from transparencies the objects that I make to resonate with the audience in a very different way. There is something different about that.
- Helps capture the audience - stay that little bit longer
- I'm a dinosaur, I use film
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.