Before photography was allowed to be art, it had to argue for it. Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography, now at Tate Modern, is about the people who made that argument, and the soft, blurred, deliberately imperfect pictures they used to make it.
The movement is called Pictorialism. From the late nineteenth century, photographers who wanted to be taken seriously as artists turned away from sharp, factual pictures. They used soft focus, hand-worked prints, mist, dusk and shadow to make photographs that looked closer to paintings and drawings than to records.
Tate's curators have said they wanted this show to work differently from the usual survey of a single movement or theme. The result is a show about mood as much as history: fog, low light, the moment a picture stops describing and starts suggesting.
It is a good exhibition for anyone who loves grain, haze and old prints, and for anyone who has ever liked a photograph better because it was slightly out of focus.
