GRAIN commissioned internationally acclaimed artist and photographer Tom Hunter  to make a new body of work in Birmingham finding, exploring and revealing places and spaces in Colmore Business District and the Jewellery Quarter.

Tom Hunter said of the commission;   ‘’For me this project is a journey back into the country’s industrial heritage and at the same time a personal journey into my own history. Many of the buildings I have photographed are monuments to this industrial past, showing us the fingerprints of working lives and the products that these endeavours created and from them a way of life and culture. I have always been attracted to these shrines from a disappearing world, a world my grandfather was meshed too, with his engineering company in Birmingham. A world I have explored through photography in Hackney Wick, where the industrial landscape became a playground for the dispossessed, and is now reincarnated as an Olympic wonderland.

All these elements have aligned themselves in this photographic essay, connecting my history to my country’s and Birmingham to Hackney. In the same way Alexander Parkes of Birmingham invented Parkesine, the base material of my film and took it to Hackney Wick to be mass-produced, I now take my pinhole photography back in time to Birmingham, to illuminate and document this very special place.”

Hunter employed a pinhole camera to make the work which had an intensity and painterly quality with dramatic dark and light been a key feature. The work was exhibited as a largescale outdoor exhibition in April – July 2013 across two city squares in Birmingham city centre