"THE WAY HOME" par Tom HUNTER. Editions Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern. 2012. Imprimé en Allemagne. Petit in-4, couverture cartonnée beige photo, titre estampé. 200 pages. Textes en anglais de Tom Hunter, Michael Rosen & Geoff Dyer, illustré de 130 reproductions photographiques hors texte, 124 en couleurs et 6 en noir & blanc, par Tom Hunter.

 

"How often Tom Hunter seems to have photographed the end of something. That it is not always or immediately clear exactly what has - or is about to - come to an end is part of the works' fascination, one of the things that detains us, that stops our experience of a particular image coming to an end. It might be just a day (dusk, twilight, the final blaze of light before darkness falls), the dazed aftermath of a party or - in a signature reworking of Vermeer - the knowledge that one has a place to live. It might be a phase of someone's life or, extrapolating from that, the end of a way of life... Even when Hunter photographs beginnings something shifts our attention back to what came before, to what had to make way for this new start (perhaps that's the purpose of the black-and-white pictures of Brick Lane at the beginning of the book). In the empty rooms of the Holly Street Voids the sense is rarely of what is going to happen next or who is going to fill the vacancy; invariably it is of what has happened, of who was there before and no longer is. This predilection makes it almost inconceivable that Hunter could be anything other than British... Another word, for this is, I suppose, tradition. In Hunter's case it is a tradition traceable back at least to the Pre-Raphaelites and their Arcadian response - an aesthetic reaction and invention that was also a tacit admission of defeat - to the regimens of industrial society. But there's a stubbornness in that impulse too: a refusal to submit that has continued to manifest itself in unexpected ways, with certain aesthetic elements remaining more or less intact, even if they've had to go underground in order to do so. That, I think, is what Hunter celebrates: the idea of alternative lifestyles - the residue of a once-widespread counter-culture - as bedraggled representatives of a seldom recognised strand of what is best about Britain…" Extrait de "Englands" par Geoff Dyer.

 

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