A photograph is always an enigma, a paradox: that ‘reality’ which it purports to show is only a fragment of a bigger story. To freeze a moment in time and memorialise it with reference neither to its past nor its future seems a deception, creating a frame that is seemingly ahistorical. And yet, since its inception in the early 19th century, photography has been a crucial means of documenting our evolving world. It is this tension between the presentation of fact and the elusive nature of the real that inspires photographers and fascinates art historians. Now, after the success of its first major photography exhibition Cruel and Tender of 2003, which explored the dispassion and empathy of social realist photography, Tate Modern seeks to reconcile the apparent superficiality of the studied studio photograph with the supposed urban truths of the street.

Rather than demystifying the puzzle, this compilation of more than 350 images weaves a web of harsh realities and beautiful surrealist dreams. As Walker Evans noted, photographs can show you what any present time will look like as the past - and often it looks quite different. Giorgio Sommer’s shot of the ‘Macaroni Eaters’ in Naples, 1885 - a huddle of people dangling lengthy strands of spaghetti into their gaping mouths - is no longer an ethnographic portrait; it now looks like a comic confection. Robert Doisneau’s decisive romantic moments, which look so snatched, were in fact carefully posed. Wolfgang Tillmans’ London tube series imposes an idea - the enforced intimacy of strangers - on a banal daily routine and is obviously a tribute to Walker Evans’ ‘Subway Portraits’, featured alongside: a set of photographs from the 1930s taken secretly with a camera concealed in his coat, its shutter connected by a cable that ran along his sleeve to his hand. Tillmans’ new perception now shifts the ethical impropriety - it is a different sort of intrusiveness we are observing.
Diane Arbus once said, ‘A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know’. And this is epitomised by her portrait, ‘Woman With a Veil on Fifth Avenue, NYC’, 1968, depicting a chubby bejewelled lady, smiling to herself about something, her barely concealed face suspended in a limbo. Compared with the street the artificial surroundings of a studio seem to be self-limiting, but they too can provide a kind of laboratory for experimentation, as with Coburn’s Vortograph of Ezra Pound, 1917, where mirrors are used to create multiple images of one face. Or, Halsman’s 1950s series ‘Jump’ in which the same movement, repeated by his celebrity subjects, is able to capture individually their personalities.
All photography is out to catch the identity of its subject, whatever this may be. The abstract forms of Paul Strand’s ‘Wall Street’, 1915, convey the monolithic quality of a Rothko, as if about to swallow the ant like figures below. And, literally chasing his subject, is Ed van der Elsken in Hong Kong - pursuing a ‘babe’. As he is merciless, she is inscrutable. Elsken informs us in a note to the pictures that she was angry. We can believe him or not. The camera can be used as the artist’s eyes to look out onto the world, but it can also be a tool for introspection, a means to act out fantasies. In her series Bus Riders, we see a very young Cindy Sherman masked up in black paint and dressed as an old man, in another room there is a recent Gillian Wearing self-portrait in which she has posed as her mother.

If at times the juxtapositions of works are somewhat jarring, both in date and content, this is nonetheless a show that develops well the story of photography, our fascination with it, and how well we have learned to read images. Early studio portraits of the ‘photocracy’ - that class of nineteenth century society obsessed with framing their faces for posterity - give way to snaps of street workers. Later in the inter-war period Friedrich Seidenstuecker and August Sander capture on film a Germany in the grips of economic crisis, a people oblivious to what was to come. Whether the photos be staged on the street or spontaneous in the studio, secret or public, they capture forever moments past, lest we forget what we are capable of. In the studio, aristocracy turns into celebrity and fashion models: enter Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton. Black and white becomes colour; small-scale pictures turn into big ones. Self-consciousness is now vanity. And poverty, it seems, mutates into wealth - though not for everybody. Yet the ideas are constant. Our existence: how we are; how we see ourselves; how we are seen. It is no accident that the exhibition opens with Louis Vert’s tramps on benches from 1905, and ends with Francis Alÿs’ ‘Sleepers’ of a century later, a slideshow of images of homeless people that he photographed in Mexico.
‘Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long’. These words from Walker Evans remind us of why photography is important. Though at times a jumbled confusion, this exhibition brings together some wonderful photos that are definitely worth learning from and delighting in.

Till 31 August 2008