Photography is like a sharp antidote on occasion for all the hyped contemporary artworks there are in our institutions over the long summer days. As engaging as paintings and performance are, photographs have the ability to put us in check with a focused pinpoint on reality when we need it most.

Unlike many in this more energetic era of instant images and celebrity, British photographer Tom Hunter adheres to the notion of engaging with his subject matter. Quite rightly, Hunter’s most significant works, the series entitled Persons Unknown and Ghetto, which were completed during his spell at the Royal College of Art, were applauded for their take on the lives of the artist’s friends and immediate neighbours in Hackney, East London. Concocting a little of the grit of Charles Dickens with the visual correctness of Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, Hunter’s works managed to arrest one’s attention as well as hold on to the materiality of life. Close up there is also something of the perfect stillness of Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi in these works.

Among these references to painters, literary figures and even social commentary is somewhere Hunter deliberately wants to be: Hunter positions himself between these cultural influences, using the apparatus of photography to produce still images that illuminate his corner of the world. For Hunter, those photographers who are out there in war-torn battle zones and famine-stricken countries are utterly disconnected from their subjects — they are there for the time it takes to compose several digital shots of some merit and the time it takes to mail them to the press offices around the world. There is no sense of who their subjects are and Hunter fears that that comes across time and time again. For a quiet, likeable man, Hunter proves incredibly convinced of his designs as a photographer and his series of Hackney shots, Persons Unknown, goes some way to demonstrate a more considered approach.

Hunter’s more recent series of works, photographs of bathing places in Dublin Bay, is a complete departure from the centrality of Hackney and its people. Commissioned by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Hunter investigated Dublin through its literature and in particular James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce, like Vermeer before him, managed to capture Hunter’s imagination and provided the visual choreography of his new shots. These incredibly deep panoramic shots of great chasms of water, for which absent bathers hold their breath, is as Joyce describes: The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. These works and their colour act as antidotes to the kind of photography Hunter distrusts and he makes a convincing case.

When discussing his ability to photograph, Hunter isn’t in awe of anyone or anything, his objectives and ambition are always realistic, never dry but wholly appropriate. He isn’t about to go for the Turner Prize, but like British artists Jeremy Deller and Richard Billingham, as well as Vermeer, Dickens and Joyce, Hunter engineers an examination of the underbelly and the ordinary. The artist goes no further than his consciousness takes him: here and now is where the drama is taking place and that is where the accolades are finally coming from.

Just as Hunter settles in as a leading figure among contemporary photographers, institutions appear to have cottoned onto the value of slow and silent works and the sustained noises of great works of art are being moved over in favour of the more thoughtful social documents of artists like Tom Hunter, Sherrie Levine and Sally Mann.