Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography review – a rhapsodic show to stop you in your tracks

Tate Modern, London From a Singapore construction worker to a loincloth-wearing Sri Lankan, this awe-inspiring and truly global exhibition finds epic beauty in the everyday I don’t remember the last time I saw such a well-researched and truly globally representative exhibition that doesn’t patronise but quietly makes its case unapologetically, fearlessly and through sheer quality.

Apart from being the first retelling of the international, pluralistic pictorialism movement, Tate’s new show allows for some refreshing encounters with unknown works for British audiences – around half of the works included here have never been shown in the UK.

The effect is to radically deepen and widen our understanding not only of art history but the human impulses that drive us to make images in the first place.

We move seamlessly from the sudden shock of colour in three-colour carbon prints of flowers in a London garden in the 1920s to works born of the photographic salons, circles and clubs of Sydney, Hong Kong and Brazil.

Historical moments collide; the epic emerges from the everyday.

A man rows home across the Norfolk Broads, another works on a construction site in Singapore.

None of it feels out of place.

It all belongs.

It is all extremely, almost ecclesiastically, beautiful.

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