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Reader rating
Description: A photographic project exploring the local businesses around Bethnal Green and Hackney.
Phone: 0208983 5200
Website: www.vam.ac.uk/moc/
Trains: Tube: Bethnal Green 
Extra info: Food, Party Hire
Design of the times: Tom Hunter's sophisticated sense of composition helps to capture the East End's lasting tradition of independent shopkeepers
Hackney is home and inspiration to Tom Hunter. His 2005 exhibition Living Hell & Other Stories was the first photographic show at the National Gallery, a project that exploited hidden Hackney locations to rework classical paintings with local people.
For Are You Being Served? Hunter explores the real-life role-playing of shopkeepers and their surprisingly designed premises that daily serve as stage sets.
The 30 images highlight Hunter's sophisticated, often playful sense of composition, aided by the symmetrical patterns created by arrangements of tins, packets, shiny wrappers - even suitcases. Unlike the cinematic lighting which effectively reworked his Vermeer or Velazquez models, here Hunter uses available shop lighting. He isolates and poses subjects formally among the surrounding visual chaos, finding relatively blank background spaces between the horizontal shelves and vertical stacked goods. A Turkish grocer's claustrophobic dwarfing by mountains of shiny tins contrasts with the immaculate minimalist symmetry of a tattooist's black and gold-lacquered parlour.
But aside from such compositional perfection, Hunter also plays with the boundaries of the frame like a photographic Howard Hodgkin: three old Mods in a scooter shop stand facing Vespa scooters which nervously poke into the room, while the four subjects in The Harrington Café are positioned around the focal parquet floor, as a lone customer sits staring beyond the edge of the frame like a character from a Gregory Crewdson scenario.
This warm, absorbing study is a calculated reminder of the East End's lasting tradition of small traders and invites locals to notice the owners' often artistic interiors.
Facing Hunter's wall of photographs is a cabinet of portraits of shopkeepers and their produce, taken by local schoolchildren - which seem to be at least as popular with the gallery's young visitors.
• Until 9 November. Information: 020 8983 5200; www.vam.ac.uk.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
