Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera

This isn't the first time that Tate Modern has fashioned a photography exhibition according to a concept that's beyond broad. In 2008, 'Street & Studio' was a dismal failure, woolly and over-inclusive. Similarly, it's hard to think of many photographs that don't have an element of voyeurism or exposure, but this is far more streamlined show.

It's also deeply scary in its illustration of the camera's ability to capture us in context and change that context by doing so: by the end of 'Exposed', even the men closing in for the rescue in Enrique Metinides's pictures of a would-be suicide atop a tower started to look to me like jackals approaching their prey. Why? The shots have a stark architectural beauty and the men are risking their lives. But by that point I'd seen a Susan Meiselas image of men avidly watching a stripper; soldiers observing a Viet Cong officer get shot in the head; a reconstruction by Oliver Lutz of a lynching; Weegee's buoyant New York children, viewing their first murder victim; Kohei Yoshiyuki's grim nightvision images of peeping Toms in the park; and perhaps most hauntingly, the desperate gaze of Amos Gexella, balancing on a sixth-floor ledge, while a crowd mills below - yelling, according to the reportage, for him to jump. Two hours later, he will.

Fear prowls this place. There's the fear of poverty, wrapped by early American photographers Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis in the determination to show it and by so doing, to help conquer it. A fear of intimacy led to ingenious disguises for cameras, many of which are displayed here: hidden in canes and the heels of shoes, tucked into waistcoats or behind trick mirrors. Is it fear or fearlessness that sends photographers to war zones (and Don McCullin is a rare omission by the curators) and impels them to point their camera at its aftermath?

Then there's both the fear of being watched (Jackie O stalker Ron Galella and Marcello Geppetti, who scooped Richard Burton's affair with Liz Taylor, are both here) and the fear of not being watched: Marilyn, shot by Weegee with dress blowing up around her wonderful legs, is as complicit as the Countess of Castiglione in her stage-managed images of almost a century earlier. Men's fear of women is on display too (and yes, Helmut Newton, I do mean you) as is women's of men. But most of all, there is the fear of death - the one subject we all long to look at, but only through a trick mirror. The last thing we want there is eye contact.

The range and quality of material is extraordinary, but perhaps inevitably, given the subject matter, 'Exposed' lacks a linear narrative, and it peters out before the end - Sophie Calle snooping around hotel bedrooms is frankly dull, as is Emily Jacir's 'Linz Diary', and many surveillance shots - Jonathan Olley in Ulster, Andreas Magdanz at East Germany's decommissioned spying HQ - are mere historical curiosities. But that's all right: snooping isn't always salacious, or even interesting, except in films noirs. Truth can be boring - which is one ugly fact that we wilfully disregard.