There's something magnificent about a life devoted to uselessness, especially when the results are so beautiful. Born in 1904, the Italian photographer Giuseppe Cavalli was only a couple of years older than Roberto Rossellini, but while the latter took cinema out onto the streets in the name of neorealism, the former was sauntering along his Adriatic coast, shooting boats, bottles and beaches so deliberately overexposed that you need sunglasses to look at them.
In 1947, he and a clutch of other talented Italians founded La Bussola ('The Compass'), a photographic group in revolt against 'the dead-end of the documentary chronicle'. This seems disingenuous – even an image of houses that is a symphony of imperfection, with peeling paint, chipped bricks, ratty shutters and battered chimneypots, tells you quite a lot about the subject – but they had just lived through a war. And anyway, Rossellini and his gang were busily chronicling away, so Cavalli and his cohorts (several of them also shown here) could afford to point their cameras at infinity.
Cavalli did actually take colour images later but this exhibition sticks with his high-key monochromes, so sepia they seem to antiipate their own eventual destruction. How anyone can volubly disdain narrative while taking poetic portraits of their young daughter remains a mystery; other images here, particularly the abstractions of Luigi Veronesi, get a lot closer. Although, of course, tracking Cavalli's influence on the likes of Veronesi and Mario Giacomelli, which this exhibition does very capably, is itself the beginnings of a narrative. Cavalli died regrettably young at the start of the 1960s; his life, like everyone's, turned out to be linear after all. And very far from useless.