The photo exhibition current on display at the Tate Modern, entitled: Street & Studio, is given a strapline of "An Urban History of Photography".  And through 11 rooms, we see everyday life, taken from the early precursors of photography, to post war shots and professional magazine portfolios.

The early rooms are just as interesting for their content as there style.  The aged brown sepia and half focused photos make the subject look dreamlike.  Even though there are some action shots of people walking down the street, we are told they had to stand still for up to 20-30 minutes, long enough for the film to be exposed. 

As technology develops, real time street shot are able to be taken.  A series of photos by Arnold Genthe shows a pre-1906 earthquake everyday life in Chinatown in San Francisco, and show a rare glimpse of early Chinese immigrants outside Asia.  There are fascinating pictures of vegetable pedlars and market traders, wearing pork pie hats with plain dark tunics.  Some walk with baskets of fruit, balanced on a pole and transported down the street.  These plain face men and women fill the photo, going about their daily business in black and white kung fu shoes. 

Most of these photos were trying to capture a scene of everyday life, though tactic employed by Ed van der Elsken involved following an anonymous woman around Hong Kong and taking pictures - perhaps making him the original paparazzi.  Photos then start to evolve into reportage, with photographers recording social injustices like street children to conditions between and after the Wars.

Studio photography also moves on, with little seen photos of Grace Kelly and Marylin Monroe signalling our obsession with celebrity.  Studios become more elaborate, with props and backdrops used for luscious Vogue and Harper Bazar cover shots.

The final contemporary section is where I find my favourite two photos.  First is Pieter Hugo's The Hyena and Other Men.  It's a photo of young Nigerian man, bare arms, with a muzzled hyena on a heavy chain leash.  They are standing on sand, under a concrete overpass that blocks the sky and with pillars covered in ripped posters.  The power is immense: of the wide-eyed staring man, the caged wild animal and the vast looming monuments of human progress.  

Just before the end is Rineke Dijkstra's Buzz Club 1996-7.  Not really a photo, but a video of clubbers.  And instead of clubbers being inside a club, Dijkstra has taken them into a studio with bright lights and alone, but with repeated loops of techno music.  The teenagers stand, with lights exposing their pasty skin.  They dance by themselves and I and other people looking at the video laugh.  But we aren't laughing at them.  We're laughing because we recognise ourselves and how silly we must look.  And how awkward it was being young and trying to be cool.

Street and Studio is a varied exhibition and mixes history with societal development.  Most importantly, it also provides a picture of humanity and the universal development of human experience.

Kwok W Wan