(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

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BONNIE GREER:
It's very interesting that this show is called Cruel and Tender, because that is actually one of the definitions of photography itself, that it actually takes an image and holds it in a kind of reality. On one hand, I was very moved by the show, of course, because there are the Walker Evans photos in it that show Mississippi. That's where my family's from. To see those images took me into those places. I was overwhelmed by it in a way that I was not expecting actually. There are so many images there. They are so stark. There is something like 26 rooms. It made me ask myself if this was actually art. That was a very strange thing for me to ask myself about this.

MARK LAWSON:
Isn't that argument over?

BONNIE GREER:
I wonder.

MARK LAWSON:
You have bad paintings and good photographs. It works both ways.

BONNIE GREER:
I know it's an old one. What the photos did for me was not so much sort of take me inside, but actually keep me outside, in a way. It made me go beyond them, into things that I had seen before, so that the photo itself became a kind of artefact of that, as opposed to me going into the experience. That's sort of why I was asking that question myself, actually.

MARK LAWSON:
Nitin, as Bonnie says, 26 rooms. It's hard to have a single reaction to it. It invites you to pick and mix, and like bits and not like others. What was your reaction?

NITIN SAWHNEY:
Absolutely. For me, the highlights were Fazal Sheik's pictures in Somalia, which were, for me, particularly powerful, because of the fact that he had actually lived with his subjects for four months before he took the pictures. As a result, although all of the pictures were attempting a degree of neutrality, it was also very interesting to see the natural emotion that emerged from the circumstances that surrounded what had happened to his subjects. This was the case with certain other people, particularly Sander and Walker Evans. Although, with people like Thomas Ruff, I thought his work felt contrived in its neutrality. I didn't really actually feel that it was making the most of the medium itself. It felt relatively flat, compared to, say, people like Eggleston, who made a lot of the colour.

MARK LAWSON:
There are huge leaps going on here. Thomas Ruff, the modern German photographer who says, "I will remove all emotion and context from these photographs." You look at his stuff, and you then have people who've been living with the people they are photographing. It's very hard for it to be coherent, and you have to approach it in that way.

NITIN SAWHNEY:
It's interesting to see different takes on the concept of realism, and on the idea of neutrality. The participation of the photographer is inevitable, and you can't actually help but be involved or engaged with the subjects.

PAUL MORLEY:
It's vast. It's in two parts. Anybody going should give themselves a lot of time, because I thought I had given myself a lot of time, but I was still late for my lunch appointment with Diane Keaton. It takes hours to go around it. It's absolutely massive. It's very biased towards America and Germany, which is interesting. You get an interesting story of America in the 20th century, and, indeed, the latter part of the German 20th century. The reason I think it's art is because they do give you looks at vanishing worlds, in a way that other art, I don't think, does. I don't think art, cinema, or writing give you such specific insights into worlds that are going as the world turns into everything being the same.

BONNIE GREER:
That's why I think it's not, in a way. What it's doing is putting me on the other side of a piece of glass. I'm not actually going beyond that image or going into that image. All of our conversations here have been about depictions of things, as opposed to feeling. I haven't heard anyone talk about feeling.