The award-winning visual artist discusses squatting, gentrification, and his exhibition on housing at Hackney Museum
The centrepiece of the At Home in Hackney photography exhibition at the Hackney Museum, extended for a second time in March, is a six-foot-tall model of a tower block on the now demolished Holly Street housing estate.
Upon closer examination, each window of the tower features a picture of the inhabitants’ home life. The viewer feels more like a welcome guest than an intruder in each flat, a level of intimacy achieved by the photographer spending six months documenting and living alongside the residents.
Its creator’s name is Tom Hunter, the renowned visual artist. Despite nursing a broken leg, he wears a proud smile as he limps across the wooden floor to meet me – he is evidently excited to elaborate on his latest work.??
“It’s a protest against the housing crisis in Hackney,” he explains. “While those tower blocks were being demonised and knocked down, as though the inner-city scum were being knocked out of them, the children who lived there were proud of their homes.??
? “I wanted to celebrate and validate that pride,” says Hunter, a Hackney resident since the early 1980s.
Hunter’s works have won some of the art world’s most coveted awards including the Rose Award for Photography at the Royal Academy, while his series Living in Hell and Other Stories became the first photography show to be put on by a solo artist at the National Gallery in 2006. The setting for Hell in this case being Hackney – the London borough Hunter has documented and championed for more than 30 years.?
In 1981, aged just 16, Hunter left his quiet life in rural Dorset to follow his girlfriend to Hackney, where he established himself in the fast-growing squatting scene.?
“Squatting wasn’t a big political statement,” Hunter explains. “Why would we pay rent for a crappy place when I could live in a big, abandoned house with all my friends for free? Squatting meant we didn’t need jobs and the creative opportunities exploded, as we converted unused rooms into art studios.
“We were the ‘stormtroopers’ who could face not having streetlights or the police nearby. The tube didn’t reach us, and cab drivers wouldn’t go to Hackney, so it became like our own village… Hackney gave me a place, an identity, and a point of focus.”?
After spending a few years working as a tree surgeon, in 1986 he spent six months hitch-hiking across the USA. There, while meeting Beatnik poets and punk icons like Patti Smith, he decided to abandon a nine-to-five lifestyle to begin a career in the arts.
Upon his return to the UK, Hunter took a photography A-level, then received a degree from the London College of Printing before taking an MA at the Royal College of Art. Hunter laughed off his tutors’ warnings that his ideas were ‘ambitious and ridiculous’.
“By this point I’d spent months driving across Europe in a double-decker bus organising squat parties and raves for 50,000 people at a time,” he recalls. “I’d hung out with people who’d broken into Soviet scrapyards and welded fighter jets together to make sculptures – they thought making a model of a ghetto in Hackney was tame and easy.”?
Hunter was proved right. His work The Ghetto from his undergraduate course was put on permanent display at the Museum of London until its closure in 2022 and his series Travellers won the 1996 Fujifilm Photography Prize.?
“I barely listened to my tutors,” Hunter chuckles. “Although one did point me towards Johannes Vermeer, which was a useful tip.”?Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window served as the inspiration for Hunter’s most iconic photograph: Woman Reading a Possession Order. In 1998, the picture won the National Portrait Gallery’s Photographic Portrait Award.
The picture also had significant political consequences. It led to a break in Hackney Council’s formerly steadfast policy of refusing to speak with squatters, resulting in a series of houses being saved from demolition – including those at Ellingfort Road and London Lane which featured in The Ghetto.
Vermeer was just one of many 17th century Golden Age Dutch painters who inspired Hunter and whose work he sought to reinterpret through the lens of East London.
“They took the focus away from kings, queens and generals and used the canvas to show the importance of ordinary people’s lives,” says Hunter.??
“I began taking photos at a time when Thatcher was trying to dehumanise society, by ostracising and humiliating miners and unions. I tried to show the dignity and humanity of ordinary people. The camera is a democratic tool. Canvases and prints put people on equal terms.”
The model of the Holly Street Estate tower block, finished in 1998, bears little resemblance to the museum’s contemporary surroundings in Hackney Central. The high street is now filled with hipster bars and arthouse cinemas. Modern Hackney seems to have been sanitised by a surge in gentrification, making it difficult to reconcile with Hunter’s artwork and descriptions of anarchistic squatter raves held in abandoned warehouses.
