Strange stories in That Place

After solo exhibitions in museums in Germany and Stockholm in 2006, tate Britain has finally given a long overdue, small but significant show to Iranian-born London-based photographer Mitra tabrizian, still incomprehensibly without serious gallery representation in Britain.

Tabrizian's precise and innovative images breathe fresh life into the "staged" photograph. The largest work is a panorama of tehran, within which 20 figures circulate. Each is an Iranian citizen playing themselves - in the style of Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami. They weren't photographed in situ but have been meticulously digitally inserted into the image. The effect is of a pictorial tableau, with a mysteriously flattened perspective, pervaded by an air of alienation and isolation, a political allegory of contemporary Iran.

Digital manipulation also lies at the heart of the series Beyond the Limits, a set of apparently nondescript scenes from the future in which something has gone wrong. In an image executed before 9/11, a tiny virtually invisible man can be spied falling out of an empty, illuminated office block.

In tabrizian's most recent work, the Photoshopping has gone. Wall House, inspired by Antonioni's films, reveals a set of enigmatic storylines, such as one in which a couple come across a crumpled newspaper on the grass. The series, Border, merges the staged narrative with photographic portraiture, in poised, melancholic pictures of Iranians in exile. The staged photograph was a revolutionary new genre of postmodern photography which swept away the idea that a photo captured a moment of truth and asked, instead, what shapes our decisions about what to take pictures of, and how. Art world outsider Victor Burgin was the British eighties pioneer, but the best known "stager" is Canadian Jeff Wall, who spends months building the sets for his photos, which depict ironically worthy themes of violence, prostitution and deprivation.

Wall spawned a thousand weak imitators, most notably Gregory Crewdson and Hannah Starkey, who have dumbed down the genre into sentimental Hollywood-esque film stills usually populated by cute girls with lost looks on their faces. tabrizian avoids this kitsch.

Instead of dealing with the familiar and overloading her work with detail, she goes for the bizarre and the stark.

Open daily, 10am-5.30pm (late night until 10pm first Friday of the month). Admission free. www.tate.org.uk

Mitra Tabrizian
Tate Britain
Millbank, SW1P 4RG