Tom Hunter stages and then photographs elaborate tableaux vivants loosely based on Old Master paintings. The people in his pictures wear modern dress and act out stories set in modern London – Hackney, to be precise – while posed and lit as though they were characters from Renaissance or Baroque art. The result is a version of contemporary life seen as if through a distorting mirror, haunted by the ghosts of the past.

A photograph taken in 1997 exemplifies Hunter’s tried and tested method. A young woman stands by a window reading a letter, while sunlight floods her face and brightens the room in which she stands. Shown in profile, she closely resembles the solemn and quietly beatific female figure in Johannes Vermeer’s celebrated painting A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, in the Gemaldegalerie in Dresden. But whereas Vermeer’s girl stands next to a table on which a fruitbowl overflows like a cornucopia, her late twentieth-century alter-ego stands next to a bed in which lies a sleeping baby. And while the girl in Vermeer’s painting is, by implication, happily in love and blessed by wealth, Hunter’s young woman is a single mother implicitly on the skids. His brusque title underscores the contrast and completes what appears to be an essay in disenchantment: Woman Reading a Possession Order.

Hunter anomalously won a prize for photographic portraiture for that picture, at the National Portrait Gallery a few years ago. Now it has been placed at the start of a new exhibition of his work, this time at the National Gallery. It makes for a muted introduction to “Living in Hell and Other Stories”, a series of more recent pictures in which the photographer visibly strives for ever-more extravagant effects of intriguing incongruity. Each of Hunter’s new photographs...

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