A review of Le Crowbar by Tom Hunter
Review by David Moore
for Photomonitor, 2014
Pilgrimage to Paradise
In the early 1990s, with the left beginning to splinter, a diverse array of social groups began to form as resistance to a perceived, amorphous political and corporate power. Some of these preferred to be political by disengagement, and arguably formed the foundation and inspiration for the likes of Occupy, Uncut, et al. They connected back in time via the media safe eco warrior, ‘Swampy’, to the Greenham Common peace camps of the 1980’s.
‘New Age’ travellers found it easy to be outside of the law; indeed they were put there by various aspects of the Criminal Justice Act, a Thatcherite sop for the electorate, ostensibly keeping the peace and these unrecognizable delinquents in their place, which certainly meant off the road.
In Le Crowbar, the pet name for a dodgily purchased double-decker, bought by Hunter and his friends, we all go on a summer techno holiday to Prague, taking along some of this home grown self sufficiency and idealism.
Here, immersion and trust go hand in hand. Hunter’s intimate documentary photographs evoke an easy fluidity between experience and observation. They offer a narrative in hazy colour, quiet moments within gently retrieved single pictures that romantically position the past in the present.
There’s a lot of waiting going on in Le Crowbar, waiting for a meal, waiting for the others, waiting for the kid to go away, just waiting. The police arrive and politely stand around asking questions. No Battle of the Bean Field, thankfully, just a gentle interruption to breakfast, a yap of a dog and settling down again.
Amidst these reveries of the journey, people come and go; polite well dressed girls, with nice necklaces and make up, forming less of a rupture to the gentile anarchy as the wedged, early morning chemical head who has seemingly beamed down from the Hacienda, urban, clawing at the sky. Something harder here than the New Forest Tokers that define some of Hunter’s other travelling companions.
What is satisfying about this book, as with much of Hunter’s output, is that it is a human and uncritical document from the interior; of wood-smoke, sunshine, flutters of uncertainty, but, experienced without machines, other of course, than this hulking, diesel-smoking bus.
The photographs themselves appear secondary to an aesthetic and condition that had already developed in Hunter’s work. The progressive nature of ‘The Ghetto’, his installation at LCC a year before is overrun here by experience, the lived day to day, on the road, under the influence and away from it all.
A couple of years ago I read Patti Smith’s autobiography ‘Just Kids’ that documents her early life in New York City. What I found moving was the account of her and Robert Mapplethorpe’s lostness, they lived hand to mouth, untraceable and free, sitting at the edge of a Warholian revolution.
In Le Crowbar I find this societal disconnection a powerful reminder. Whilst only travelling in Europe, it may as well have been another planet; time and distance meant something else, something further away.
How quickly we have all changed, how irreversibly networked we all are, how target driven, and how lost in other ways we have become; we witness in Le Crowbar, the significance of camaraderie and the pleasures of doing very little.
©David Moore 2014
Review by David Moore
for Photomonitor, 2014
Pilgrimage to Paradise
In the early 1990s, with the left beginning to splinter, a diverse array of social groups began to form as resistance to a perceived, amorphous political and corporate power. Some of these preferred to be political by disengagement, and arguably formed the foundation and inspiration for the likes of Occupy, Uncut, et al. They connected back in time via the media safe eco warrior, ‘Swampy’, to the Greenham Common peace camps of the 1980’s.
‘New Age’ travellers found it easy to be outside of the law; indeed they were put there by various aspects of the Criminal Justice Act, a Thatcherite sop for the electorate, ostensibly keeping the peace and these unrecognizable delinquents in their place, which certainly meant off the road.
In Le Crowbar, the pet name for a dodgily purchased double-decker, bought by Hunter and his friends, we all go on a summer techno holiday to Prague, taking along some of this home grown self sufficiency and idealism.
Here, immersion and trust go hand in hand. Hunter’s intimate documentary photographs evoke an easy fluidity between experience and observation. They offer a narrative in hazy colour, quiet moments within gently retrieved single pictures that romantically position the past in the present.
There’s a lot of waiting going on in Le Crowbar, waiting for a meal, waiting for the others, waiting for the kid to go away, just waiting. The police arrive and politely stand around asking questions. No Battle of the Bean Field, thankfully, just a gentle interruption to breakfast, a yap of a dog and settling down again.
Amidst these reveries of the journey, people come and go; polite well dressed girls, with nice necklaces and make up, forming less of a rupture to the gentile anarchy as the wedged, early morning chemical head who has seemingly beamed down from the Hacienda, urban, clawing at the sky. Something harder here than the New Forest Tokers that define some of Hunter’s other travelling companions.
What is satisfying about this book, as with much of Hunter’s output, is that it is a human and uncritical document from the interior; of wood-smoke, sunshine, flutters of uncertainty, but, experienced without machines, other of course, than this hulking, diesel-smoking bus.
The photographs themselves appear secondary to an aesthetic and condition that had already developed in Hunter’s work. The progressive nature of ‘The Ghetto’, his installation at LCC a year before is overrun here by experience, the lived day to day, on the road, under the influence and away from it all.
A couple of years ago I read Patti Smith’s autobiography ‘Just Kids’ that documents her early life in New York City. What I found moving was the account of her and Robert Mapplethorpe’s lostness, they lived hand to mouth, untraceable and free, sitting at the edge of a Warholian revolution.
In Le Crowbar I find this societal disconnection a powerful reminder. Whilst only travelling in Europe, it may as well have been another planet; time and distance meant something else, something further away.
How quickly we have all changed, how irreversibly networked we all are, how target driven, and how lost in other ways we have become; we witness in Le Crowbar, the significance of camaraderie and the pleasures of doing very little.
©David Moore 2014