Tom Hunter at Mission Gallery, Swansea

Diffusion, the Cardiff International Festival of Photography, may finish this month, but one of its highlights, an exhibition of Tom Hunter’s series ‘Unheralded Stories’ remains on view at Mission Gallery, Swansea, until mid-July. Hunter stages photographic scenes in response to both art-historical paintings and the conditions of his home borough of London, Hackney.

_{Tom Hunter, 'The Death Of Coltelli', 2009. 122 x 152 cm edition of 5. Courtesy Mission Gallery.}

This body of work sees the photographer telling the personal tales of fellow residents that might not reach the newspaper. The death of an Amhurst Road coffee owner is represented with a reimagining of Delacroix’s masterpiece Death of Sardanapalus (1827); a young woman flings herself half on to a stained mauve mattress in a gloomy interior, more in grief than death.

_{Tom Hunter, 'The Mole Man', 2010. Courtesy Mission Gallery.}

The curious story of Mortimer Road resident William Lyttle is dramatised in another moving work. For over 40 years since the 1960s, Lyttle obsessively dug a network of tunnels and caves underneath his property, spreading beneath the buildings of his neighbours and nearby roads.

_{Tom Hunter, The Fall of the Night', 2010. Courtesy Mission Gallery.}

Known locally as ‘the Mole Man’, Lyttle is represented in Hunter’s photograph at rest, exhausted from his efforts, lying against a rock in one of his underground chambers, his pose extrapolated from a figure Hunter found in Giordano’s Fall of the Rebel Angels (1666). The artist reminds us that the same pathos palpable in Old Masters paintings is present every day in our local community.

• Tom Hunter is at Mission Gallery, Swansea, until 14 July 2013

Sam Phillips is a London-based arts journalist and contributor to RA Magazine

• Royal Academy of Arts