Same place: different face

Photography Review - Time Europe: Then & Now

Time magazine has burst its staples and liberated its centre-spread to run riot on the walls of the National Theatre. And what an unruly stampede.

Every landmark uprising from the past 50 years is here - from the resistance movement in Budapest to the Berlin Wall and Prague's 'velvet revolution' - captured as it made history and then chronicled as it stands today. The resulting journey through European history, unfortunately, looks rather dull.

While the original black and white shots smack of passion and activism, today's compositions seem to have had all the fight and the colour knocked out of them. Corner shops have been replaced by McFrontages; impassioned locals by aimless tourists.

Mostly, the advancing years have been kind (with the exclusion of poor Benidorm and its SimCity-esque swell) and heartening (a Londonderry with its veil of violence lifted; Mostar and its symbolic bridge reconstruction between Croat and Muslim sides).

But more often than not, it's a corporate vacuum where a moment once was, and the contrivance falls a little flat. TIME has the best photographers in the business, but this brief - to 'play detective... and hunt down the exact spot where the (original) pictures had been taken' - feels a little smug.

A better detective would have hunted down the activists of today, at their console, in the clubs, and paralleled the history makers of yesteryear.