Some things deserve stick

This collection displays can be a nightmare to review. Do you judge the raw materials (ie the museum's collection), or the way in which they are presented?

As you would expect, the V&A's vault of historic photographs is intrinsically interesting. But, sadly, this display has not done it justice. The title, Seeing Things, gives a hint of how vague a curatorial premise we are operating under. Of course, we see things when we look through a camera and, of course, we see things when we look at an image. The knack is to extract from this more meaningful insights about the human psyche, politics, and our relationship with the world.

Instead, we get the drabbest possible categories imposed on images that won't happily be reduced to any of them: "natural things", "people and things", "making things", yawn yawn. Nothing is specific, and it is infuriating.

So, what redeems the show? Edward Weston's Excusado (1926) is the most seductive shot of a toilet I have ever seen - the porcelain base is uncannily alive, like a slimy creature. There are some exquisite works by Andre Kertesz (Mondrian's house, a puddle in Central Park) and Manuel Alvarez Bravo.

August Sander's rotund and belligerently confrontational pastry chef (1929) is a triumph, as is Richard Avedon's picture of Marlene Dietrich at the Ritz (1952).

But these are predictable old classics. What about the new guys? This is where the show really goes astray. A didactic text on the wall about post-modernism reveals how glaringly out of kilter the later work is among daguerreotypes and modern masters. The section becomes even less convincing when you find the work of exemplary postmodernists - such as Richard Prince - plonked in one of the other five categories. When you imagine how the V&A's works could be exhibited, Seeing Things becomes quite disheartening. More thoughtful agendas, explored with a smaller range of material, would be better - as the V&A has started to do with Lewis Morley's seminal contact prints of Christine Keeler, next to Dame Edna's homage to this pose (why not Joe Orton too?) and the chair itself.

This is not the V&A at its best.