A snapshot of 20th century photography

Attempting an overview of 20th-century European photography is brave; hitching that to a history of the 20th century risks confusion.

So it's to the Barbican's credit that an exhibition taking in 22 artists and spanning more than 90 years manages to keep a thread of coherence.

But what makes In The Face Of History worth seeing is the strength of the individual photographers featured and the faces they each present.

Some faces wear make-up as mask - such as Brassa''s 1930s prostitutes - or as transformation, as with the transsexuals Christer Strmholm documented in the 1950s.

Others reveal the photographer's relationship to their subjects: a trio of miniskirt-clad girls crossing the road (pictured) laugh at Ed van der Elsken, while a boy looks up as Henryk Ross photographs a man collapsing from hunger on the street. Secretly snapped while he was a prisoner in a Jewish ghetto in Poland between 1940 and 1945, Ross's images are shocking.

Ross's work can clearly be placed on a timeline but some inclusions are more personal. After Ross, two of the most poignant pieces are of women who committed suicide. Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz's 1913 close-up of his fiancee's face was taken just a year before she died, and Seiichi Furuya's wife is the only subject of his 70-picture Portrait series, running from just after they met in 1978 until her suicide in 1985.

Yet historical moments are landmarked here, with wider social change shown in choice of colour as much as subject. Ukrainian Boris Mikhailov's sepia-tinted vision of his hometown Kharkov is far from nostalgic, and Wolfgang Tillmanns paints post-Cold War Berlin with Technicolor branding on cigarettes and soup tins.

Until Jan 29, Barbican, Silk Street EC2, daily 11am to 8pm (Tue and Thu to 6pm), £6 to £8. Tel: 020 7638 8891. www.barbican.org.uk Tube: Barbican/Moorgate

In The Face Of History: European Photographers In The 20th Century
Barbican Art Gallery
Silk Street, EC2 8DS