Woman Reading a Possession Order (1998)

Woman Reading a Possession Order (1998)

Bathed in a beautiful morning light, Tom Hunter's young woman looks likes she's stepped out of Johannes Vermeer's seventeenth-century masterpiece ‘Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window'. The narrative, though, is pure late twentieth-century.

Fillipa is a squatter reading an eviction notice from Hackney Council. Hunter, at the time a fellow member of Hackney's squatter community, shot the image for his ‘Persons Unknown' series.

It went on to win the John Kobal National Portrait award and has shown around the world. ‘I never envisaged this response to a photograph I took of my neighbour and friend in a squat one sunny morning in Hackney,' he says. ‘But its intimate depiction of the mother and child in a moment of vulnerability seems to resonate in a universal way.'

Attribution: Tom Hunter

Licence: CC BY 2.0

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