Andrew Walker BBC News Profiles Unit

Martin Parr: Common Sense 1995-1999

Tate Modern's new exhibition - Cruel and Tender: The Real in the 20th Century Photograph, is its first major exhibition dedicated purely to photography.

The museum's first foray into photography showcases a number of high-profile names, including Diane Arbus, Robert Adams and William Eggleston, each of whom sought a detached, yet inherently artistic, view of people, places and events.

The first major exponent of this style of photography was August Sander who, from 1912 onward, chronicled life in Germany through a series of portraits, of farmers, clergymen, women students and disabled people.

Sanders' photographs offer a highly personal, and original, perspective, mirroring the dislocation of German society following World War I.

Rineke Dijkstra: Forte de Casa, May 20, 2000

Such themes, of alienation, disillusion and the dramatic within the mundane, permeate the whole exhibition. Diane Arbus, for instance, left fashion photography to capture images of those at the margins of society, transvestites, dwarves, giants and old people.

Others, like the Ukranian Boris Mikhailov, feature shocking images of bruised and drunken homeless people from the former Soviet Union, often exposing themselves to the camera.

It is strong meat and certainly not for everyone.

But all of the photographs at this exhibition are non-judgemental, whether they are Martin Parr's colourful and gently humorous views on consumerism or Paul Graham's bleak view of life in DHSS waiting rooms during the 1980s.

And Nicholas Nixon's series of pictures, entitled the Brown Sisters - pictures of his wife and her four sisters taken annually from 1975 - are delightfully touching.

Paul Graham: Mother and baby, Highgate DHSS, 1984

Also, Rinke Dijkstra's portraits of Portuguese bullfighters are vivid and characterful.

Though not of uniform quality - I thought, for instance, that Michael Schmidt's uncompromising self-portraits and pictures of Berlin were poorly-executed, self-indulgent and affected - there is much here to praise.