Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography

Why it is worth going

It is the first major exhibition to treat pictorialism, the movement that made photography an art from the 1880s to the 1960s, as a global one.¹ More than 200 rare prints by over 80 artists come from Seoul, Sydney, New York, Cape Town, Brazil and Singapore, several never shown before, hung alongside Tate's own holdings.¹ Among them are Long Chin-San's Riverside Spring (1942), lent from the Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A, work by Lionel Wendt, and Luo Bonian's Drawing Water from a Well (1932), bought by Tate this year.¹ It fills the Eyal Ofer Galleries on Level 3 of the Natalie Bell Building.¹