Life is grand

Using headlines from his local paper as inspiration, artist Tom Hunter's subject is east London today. But he also looks to the Old Masters - and in doing so, he hopes to elevate the everyday to the epic. Now his photographs will be the first ever shown at the National Gallery. Decca Aitkenhead reports
Tom Hunter: Living in Hell and Other Stories, National Gallery
Murder: Two Men Wanted, 2003 (above right) recreates Piero di Cosimo's A Satyr Mourning Over A Nymph (left). Photograph: © The National Gallery

Tom Hunter began photographing his friends in Hackney just over a decade ago. Like him, they were squatters, but his photographs evoked the atmosphere of Old Masters, bringing the language of classical paintings to images of urban modernity. The pictures in his latest collection, Living In Hell, take their titles from headlines in the Hackney Gazette, and represent scenes from east London life - street brawls, suicides, sex attacks and strip clubs. They are sumptuous compositions, richly beautiful but haunting, some eerie and disturbing, but all hushed and still. They are the first photographs ever to be exhibited at London's National Gallery.

Although the titles belong to journalism, Hunter's work is the opposite of reportage photography, for it is meticulously styled and staged, every piece relating in some way to a great work of art. Some portraits borrow the light of an Old Master, others the composition or the colours, and some simply gesture to the same sensibility. By echoing the aesthetics of Old Masters, Hunter's photographs are designed to suggest a subversive political subtext, by finding beauty and significance in the ordinary, the impoverished and the marginalised.

"What the old Dutch painters did was quite revolutionary at the time - just to paint an ordinary person such as a maid, instead of a prince," he says. "It was unheard of then - and highly political. And my work is political as well.

"The whole idea was to elevate the status of my sitters; to take the attributes of classical painting and put them on to my sitters. That was my political motivation. I've always been political, and it's very important to me that people don't see Hackney as a mythical place. It is a real place, and it's somewhere everyone up and down the country can relate to. These things are going on in every town and county. You don't have to go to Afghanistan to find a war zone. People are shooting each other every day in Hackney."

The inspiration for each piece in Living In Hell came from a local news story. Hunter would create a mental vision of a photograph from the headline and gradually, as the image took shape in his mind, its relationship to a classical painting would emerge. He doesn't cast professional models; his subjects are friends or acquaintances in Hackney. He simply waits for the right people to present themselves.

"I never sit down and plan. Things just fall into place in their own time," Hunter says. "I just like using people around me. The same as, rather than using studios, I want real locations, so that it has that reality. It makes it more believable. A lot of photographers use professionals, but for me, for it to be realistic, there has to be a connection."

Hunter, 40, works alone, occasionally using one assistant to help create the sets, and can take up to 18 months to create a photograph. The title piece, Living In Hell (the only one to use a professional actor, his original model having fallen ill) was shot in a flat belonging to a friend of a friend, which he painstakingly redecorated and furnished with bric-a-brac and furniture from East End markets, and 150 dead cockroaches pinned to the walls. It takes its reference from Four Figures At A Table, a 17th-century portrait by the Le Nain brothers of a family of four, grey and haunted with poverty.

"At least," Hunter says, "they had each other then. They had the family - the four of them. I wanted to show that, now, people are living all alone."

Nun Tears Strip Off Club Client was inspired by a story about a South American nun who travels the world, chastising men in strip clubs for looking at naked women. Its relationship to its classical reference, Diego Velásquez's The Immaculate Conception, is quite obscure - signified only by the statue the nun holds - but in some of the other works the connection is obvious. Murder: Two Men Wanted, showing a man and a dog gazing down from either side on to the corpse of a young woman in urban parkland, explicitly recreates the composition of Piero di Cosimo's 15th-century painting A Satyr Mourning Over A Nymph.

"With this photograph," Hunter says, "you feel as though you've just arrived, and something has just happened - maybe the girl's just been killed. You're not quite sure what's just happened, and it's up to you which way you take it. You backtrack and go forward - you make your own beginning and your own end. It's like you've walked into the cinema, only in the middle, and it's not going anywhere. You've got to try to make the best of the narrative yourself.

"But by relating it to di Cosimo's mythical Greek narrative, hopefully I'm encouraging the viewer to think, oh, is there something quite magical going on there, and universal? There are lots of elements, and hopefully they're all sort of intermixing into one."

Another piece, Girls' Sex Acts In Club: Court. Cop "It Can Only Be Described As Having Sex Through Clothes", comes from a story about the hypocrisy of a Hackney strip club's rules, which purport to prohibit physical interaction between customers and the girls. The photograph borrows from the composition of a 16th-century work by Lucas Cranach, Cupid Complaining To Venus, which shows Cupid in tears, having been stung while trying to raid a beehive for honey. Venus gazes down at him, naked but for a beautiful necklace.

Here, Hunter explains, his own piece echoes not only Cranach's composition, but something of his artistic subtext. "The nude and Cupid was about the artist wanting to paint a beautiful naked woman, but having to find an excuse - a way of doing it in a moral context, by pretending to show a moral message about the pain of pleasure - being stung for honey."

For Batter Or Worse was inspired by a story about a brawl that broke out at Hackney town hall during a wedding. It echoes another di Cosimo painting, The Fight Between The Lapiths And The Centaurs, which shows a hideous, fantastical fight. "But it's Hackney on a Saturday night," Hunter says. "All these things are repeated, every week, every month, every millennium. I'm not picking out odd things, I'm picking out things that are repeated. It is Hackney life. Di Cosimo's painting was about these two ancient tribes in Greece, and the wedding families in Hackney were Gypsy travellers. So it's all very contemporary."

The relationship between Hunter's photographs and Old Masters is intended to work as a two-way process. The aesthetic connection not only dignifies his modern subjects, by granting them historical artistic resonance, but should also encourage us, he says, to look at classical painting with a fresh eye.

"As soon as you think of an Old Master, or an old artwork, people look at it in a gallery, and all the politics is completely drained out of it. People just think of the price tag, the brush strokes, the fame, and all the politics is siphoned off. School kids go round, and they either disengage, or they just look at it as a picture. So it's also quite nice for me to say, well, actually, look, these guys were talking about very political things, they're very relevant. It's not just about airy-fairy notions. My best mate sort of groaned when I said I was showing at the National Gallery. But then when he came down, he said, 'Fucking hell, they're dealing with rape, they're dealing with murder, there's rape, there's executions, beheadings...'

"So it's nice to reawaken the past, and hopefully that reawakens the present as well."

Hunter grew up in Dorset and didn't move to Hackney until he was 25; there he squatted in a house on Ellingfort Road, among a community of artists who had occupied the entire street. The council wanted the squatters evicted and Hunter became embroiled in a protracted battle to save the street for the community. When he discovered that Thomas Hardy had once trawled the Dorchester Evening Echo for stories to weave into his novels, Hunter found inspiration for his first piece from a story in the Hackney Gazette, which described Ellingfort Road as a "crime-ridden, derelict ghetto". Hunter began photographing his neighbours, using a large format camera and long exposures, and entered the work for his degree in photography at the London College of Printing (LCP). When tutors asked him to cite his references, he was struck by the echoes in his work of the old Dutch painters.

"So I put them in as references, but really more as an afterthought than a direct reference. Sort of the wrong way round - to justify it." He grins. "As one does."

But he seemed to have stumbled upon something, and developed the theme at the Royal College. His Woman Reading A Possession Order won the 1998 John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award, and since then he has accumulated the signifiers of Britart success - Jay Jopling of White Cube for an agent, Charles Saatchi a collector. David Furnish bought a piece as a present for Elton John, and his work sells all over the world.

In person, though, he still seems closer to a character from Hardy than Hoxton. The National Gallery's curator has described him as "a most modest and self-effacing young man, most unusual for an artist of the Hirst-Emin generation", and his softly unassuming West Country vowels, weather-beaten face and thick flaxen hair do little to offset an appealing impression of the bucolic naïf.

He had always hated art as a child. His mother was a part-time painter, his father an art teacher, "and they would take me to art exhibitions all the time. But they were interested in 60s abstract art - boring, highbrow nonsense I couldn't relate to at all. It seemed like a very pretentious, boring, middle-class chattering thing - not earning money, being pointless, just totally pointless. I always thought, no way, I'm not doing any of that. I was desperate to just get out and work." He left school at 16, lived in a caravan and worked for the Forestry Commission. His job when he first came to London was as a tree surgeon.

Even when he enrolled at the LCP, he couldn't see the point in some contemporary work. "I really disliked lots of political art. When it's just text - really black and white, nothing really to visually engage you. Every time I've seen political work and it's got no aesthetic value, it bores me stupid, and I'll walk out the gallery." He assumed that modern tastes would always consider politics and aesthetics incompatible, and was astonished when Woman Reading A Possession Order won acclaim. "I thought, no, this work will never take off. I wanted to engage visually, to seduce people, in the way the Old Masters did. And I didn't think people were interested in that any more."

When the National Gallery announced it would be showing Hunter's work, some traditionalist eyebrows in the art world were raised. Exhibitions by living artists are rare enough at the National Gallery; a photographic show was unprecedented. Does Hunter consider himself to be a photographer, or an artist?

"Er," he smiles awkwardly. "Well, I trained to be a photographer, and I always wanted to be a photographer." He takes a breath. "But now I don't, really. I do call myself an artist. I'm not trying to get the best photographic image to illustrate something. I'm trying to express ideas about situations. I'm trying to create something - create a portrait of Hackney, as it were. Paint a landscape of Hackney. So I feel as though I am an artist."

He seems self-conscious about asserting the distinction, though. "Well, yeah," he agrees. "I grew up in a small working village and if you said you were an artist, everyone would snigger and think you were pretentious. But that's what I'm doing now. I'm doing exactly the same as all these other artists over the ages, just using the best tools available at the time. I've come along, and I want to bring a documentary reality element into my work. And photography is the best way for me to illustrate that. I'm using what I think are the best artistic tools available to me to create my vision. And hopefully it will be considered as art."

There was more controversy recently, when the mother of the Hackney stabbing victim Margaret Muller interpreted Murder: Two Men Wanted as a direct representation of her daughter's murder, and complained that her consent had not been sought. Hunter argues that the piece "is not specifically about that girl, as such. It's about women being attacked." Having become so successful, though, does he begin to worry about the tension between dignifying deprivation, and exploiting it?

"No, not at all. I'm still living in Hackney, on the same street. I've still got the same friends. I'm not making huge amounts of money. I'm doing the same as every other artist over the ages; I'm talking about my situation, my surroundings. That's why none of the people in the photographs saw me as exploiting them. They just saw me as a friend, who's showing them off to the rest of the world."

Having spent the past two years preparing for the National Gallery exhibition, he doesn't "have a clue" what he will do next. Were he rich, he suspects he might find new subject matter to work with, but he is a "long way away" from that. He and the other squatters bought Ellingfort Road from the council 11 years ago, renovated the houses and turned them into a housing cooperative, which they run together. "I'm not flying in from Hampstead to take pictures of the poor victims in the street," Hunter points out, "so there has never been that conflict for me.

"But then," he admits, "photography is exploitative. I mean, everything is. Newspapers are exploitative. The Hackney Gazette exploits people's situations to sell newspapers. But I want to make it a subject we discuss. I want to discuss what's going on around me. Why can't my girlfriend, why can't women that I know - why can't I, in fact - walk across London Fields at night? Why is this old woman left in a flat for two years without being rehoused? What is going on with the social fabric? I want to comment on it."

· Tom Hunter: Living In Hell And Other Stories is at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London, from December 7-March 12 2006; 020-7747 2885.