Now Here  Calais (2016)






Hatton's images of the Calais Refugee camp productively contribute to a growing body of work in this area. They document the transition toward a sense of permanence that has grown out of the makeshift and temporary. His high-contrast, monochromatic photographs really push the documentary feel of the images, but by being unpopulated, their emotional weight is somewhat indirect. They are packed with detail and a sense of tragedy.

CLIFF LAUSON, Curator, Hayward Gallery
Tom Hatton's pictures have for me real presence and real purpose. They do a very difficult thing: they speak about the refugee crisis without cliché or sanctimony or voyeurism. They are conceived in an artistic rather than a journalistic mode that is nevertheless not aestheticized. I admire the way his voice is low key and that is what gives his pictures their quiet power.

KATE BUSH, Head of Photography, Science Museum Group





Rather than provide a fixed truth or decisive moment, these photographs instead demand an encounter with the Calais Refugee Camp without a pre-loaded or sensational political agenda. We are not shown the refugees but the traces of their everyday lives in the camp. Their absence is central to the work and invites the construction of fictions emptied of embedded prejudices.  
The black and white large format film separates the viewer from both from their idea of the camp and of expected journalistic imagery. By creating a space for reflection these images allow the viewer to escape pre-mediated opinions of refugees and instead relay a human space, fragile, psychologically complex and held together by the coldest manifestations of chance.





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