Tom Hunter: The Way Home

The meticulously composed, painterly tableaux of London-based photographer Tom Hunter (born 1965) marry the look and mood of paintings by the likes of Vermeer or Chardin with the sociopolitical concerns of twenty-first-century Britain--specifically, the London borough of Hackney, notorious for its recent gentrification and its consequent disparities between rich and poor. Hunter’s 1998 “Woman Reading a Possession Order,” which depicts a (real) squatter reading a (real) eviction notice by a window, references Vermeer’s 1657 “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window,” completely sabotaging all the qualities of uplift, privacy and reverie that we relish in Vermeer, with a subversiveness that is both mischievous and acute. When it was first exhibited, this powerful photograph attracted so much press attention that the eviction was withdrawn. Handsomely produced, as befits the gorgeousness of Hunter’s images, The Way Home is the second monograph on this much-celebrated photographer.