Picture this

The title of this absorbing, stylishly laid-out exhibition is possibly a misnomer. Extensive it is, but photo-journalism is largely excluded. Thus, except for Henryk Ross’s startling snapshots of a 1940s Polish ghetto and Emmy Andriesse’s stark conspectus of famine-ravaged wartime Amsterdam, plus uneven forays into Berlin or late Soviet Russia, the exhibition touches on politics mainly by inference. André Kertész’s tame Austro–Hungarian army snaps cannot match dramatic newsreel of key events — D-Day or Vietnam, Budapest 1956 or the fall of the Ceausescus — which featured in previous Barbican photographic exhibitions.

Rather, this is a thoughtful, slightly quirky social document, which offers an idiosyncratic sprinkling of more than 20 of the ablest photographers who have, over a century’s span, celebrated place by charting urban or rural life in Europe, both East and West. Expressive portraits of individuals, innocent and knowing alike, feature in their natural habitats — in bars and clubs, amid rural communities, among humble surroundings reshaped by war and ideology — resigned to their modest lot, bestriding adversity or revelling in the sheer joy of being.