United Kingdom –
Life on the Road captures a remarkable moment in time, in the 1990s, when young people travelled around Europe in a variety of vehicles adapted as homes, forming transitory communities based around festivals, music and a shared rejection of the increasingly consumerist values of Western society.
Travelling in decommissioned buses and vans, these new explorers constructed a vision of a kind of utopia, which is now embedded in our collective memory of the 1990s. From Hunter’s documentary of everyday life on the road, to Fawcett’s meticulous record of traveller buses, and Gaston’s elegiac footage of parties, this exhibition, which is an integral part of UAL Green Week, is both celebration and memorial.
Image© Tom Hunter
In 1995 Tom Hunter set off from a squatted street in Hackney with a group of friends in an old double decker bus, loaded with muesli, Sosmix, baby-foot table and a sound system. Fuelled by selling egg butties, veggie burgers and beer, their journey took them through folk festivals in France, teknivals in Czech Republic, hippie gatherings in Austria and beach parties in Spain. Le Crowbar Café became an oasis for a nomadic party community hungry for all night food and a break from the hardcore techno.
210 x 270mm, 96pp
68 photographs + 1 illustration
Text & Photography by Tom Hunter
Offset lithoprint
Published by Here Press