Tom Hunter is the past master

They are to go on show at the Museum of London, an appropriate venue for an artist who has only ever had one muse. London, and specifically the seemingly unlovely district of Hackney, has given Hunter enough subject matter and inspiration "to last a lifetime", he says. Collected by the Tate, the V&A, Charles Saatchi and Elton John, and still the only photographer ever to have been granted a solo exhibition at the National Gallery, Hunter has always found a perversely soothing beauty in even the most neglected, or edgy, parts of the capital.

The new series, commissioned in celebration of the Museum's new Galleries of Modern London, features real 21st- century Londoners in real costumes dating from the 17th to the 20th centuries (discovered in the museum's vast wardrobes), alongside "props" from a different time altogether — instantly creating a surreal sense of jumbled history, like a muddled dreamscape or snapshots from the photo album of a Time Lord.

Here, for example, we have a modern-day hedge-fund manager in the pink and gold foppery of a mid-18th century city merchant standing next to a Ford motor car from the 1930s. A Museum of
London curator is dressed as a Lyons tea maid posed in an early 18th-century London prison cell, complete with the actual graffiti left by 18th-century prisoners. Two schoolboys done up as Victorian urchins sit in a sumptuous 1920s Arts and Crafts elevator salvaged by the Museum of London from Selfridges department store.

Most are formal portraits; some have an eerie, ghostlike quality — reminicent of Hiroshi Sugimoto's disconcerting photographs of waxwork models from Madame Tussauds.

"The best thing was, I got to wander for two or three days around the Museum of London's huge warehouse of stuff," says Hunter, who is 44 and lives, naturally, in Hackney. "It's extraordinary, like something out of Indiana Jones, full of these glorious treasures salvaged from London's streets over the centuries. Entire shop fronts, enormous clocks; the cell from a debtors' prison in Wapping, which was rebuilt for me using the original wooden planks with their beautiful, morbid graffiti of gallows and nooses. In a sense, this mad mixing of objects and time is a metaphor for London itself."

We're sitting outside a café on Broadway Market, and Hunter gestures towards London Fields. "Look around here. Down that street you see a Dutch almshouse next to a Victorian terrace, opposite a Gothic church spire, right by a 1970s tower block. It couldn't be more muddled up, yet it all seems to work."

Hunter comes originally from Dorset, and almost 20 years in Hackney haven't entirely flattened his vowels. He was 25 when he "escaped" the West Country — and immediately fell in love with then-grotty east London. "I grew up in a small village in Thomas Hardy country. But nowadays Dorset is full of holiday homes; everyone born there leaves as soon as they can. It seems to me that the countryside has lost that sense of community you now find in a part of London such as Hackney. I do think it's beautiful here. It's a real place, with roots and nourishment, not a picture postcard."

Hunter had no intention of becoming an artist. His mother was a part-time painter and his dad an art teacher; and, as a child, art "seemed like a very pretentious, boring, middle-class chattering thing [to do], being totally pointless and not earning money". His first job in London was as a tree surgeon. "But in the end I got bored with all the rubbish jobs I was doing, and photography seemed like an easy way of making a living." He grins. In fact, each picture takes him months to compose and hours to take. He works on a large format camera with expensive film, and "literally can't afford to make a mistake".

It's Hunter's clever merging of Hackney's modern
subject matter with the atmosphere and language of classical painting that defines his most famous work, Woman Reading a Possession Notice.

The image of a woman standing at a window gazing intently at a repossession letter, in conscious imitation of Vermeer's A Girl Reading at an Open Window, won him the National Portrait Gallery's John Kobal photographic portrait prize in 1998, and was followed by the series Living in Hell for the National Gallery in 2004, which also references Old Masters and found inspiration in a series of gruesome headlines from The Hackney Gazette. Many of these photographs are featured in a major Hunter retrospective at the University of the Arts next month.

He first began experimenting with such highbrow art historical allusions as a student at the Royal College of Art. At the time Hunter was living in a squat on Ellingfort Road, off Mare Street, and the woman with the possession notice was a real-life neighbour (she later won a reprieve). "When you look at my work," he says, "hopefully you'll be seduced by the beauty.

But I'd also like people to know the context and to try to understand what they're saying." By using the light or composition or colours of Diego Velázquez, say, or Piero di Cosimo, Hunter dignifies and elevates the banal subject matter of down-at-heel Hackney into something hauntingly beautiful. In part, it's a political statement — but it's also the simple documentation and celebration of London's least celebrated quarter.

When Charles Saatchi bought Woman Reading a Possession Order in the late 1990s, Hunter seemed to be heading towards Britpack stardom. He acquired an agent in Jay Jopling, and started showing at White Cube in Mayfair — but admits that he lacked the instinct for self-publicity, didn't much like the glitz, and was never a fully paid-up member of the Shoreditch art crowd. At the time, a senior curator at the National Gallery described him as "a modest and self-effacing young man, most unusual for an artist of the Hirst-Emin generation".

"I find big shows very scary," Hunter says. "It feels like ripping off all your clothes, jumping on a table and doing a weird dance in front of lots of strangers." There were those who sniffed when the National Gallery decided to host a "mere" photographer but Hunter dismisses them with a shake of his head. "If Caravaggio were alive today, he'd be making beautiful, popular films in Hollywood. He'd be like Scorsese. It doesn't matter what the medium is, artists try to express themselves in the best and most beautiful way they can. Right now, for me that's photography."

But will he ever tire of Hackney? "How could I? I'm painting a landscape of the place, in a way. It's inexhaustible. Maybe in 20 years I'll be able to show the whole of Hackney as it really was. Not as a mythical place; not as a place known only for violence. But as my home."

Flashback opens at Museum of London, EC2 (020 7001 9844; www.museumoflondon.org.uk) tomorrow and runs until March 2010; entrance free. Tom Hunter: A Journey Back is
at Arts Gallery, 65 Davies Street W1 (020 7514 6000; www.arts.ac.uk)
3 June-18 September; entrance free.