The title of this exhibition evokes a densely typed PhD thesis, composed over many cups of strong coffee by an earnest young man in a black polo neck. This is photography as art history. The names may not be familiar to those of us who primarily consider photography a method of recalling holidays and hen nights, but the images and techniques have been so influential that everyone who has read a design magazine, bought a punk record or attended an art school disco will be hit with déjà vu. Today, the characteristics that define modernist photography — heavy cropping, strong diagonal lines, the use of multiple images in a collage — are integrated into the mainstream.

This, however, is where it all began. Between the first and second world wars, in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Austria, there was an explosion of photography.

The growth of the printing industry created a demand for visual material for magazines, books and advertisements. And political developments — the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the creation of new nation states, industrialisation, the changing role of women — gave a new generation of photographers rich material and a medium with which to explore it.

Foto is, according to the curator, Daniel Herrmann, the first exhibition to bring all these strands together.

“Other shows have looked at one artist — Henri Cartier-Bresson, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy — but this looks at the medium and the success of the medium at that particular time, in that particular region,” he says.

All the key texts are there. Paul Citroen’s Metropolis, the image regularly used to illustrate photomontage in art books, juxtaposes new architecture, radio towers, cafes and cinemas at sharp angles, disregarding central perspective, to create a large, confident vision of the brave new modernist future.

John Heartfield’s chilling poster Fathers and Sons, with the German field marshal Paul von Hindenburg in front of a row of skeletons, with children in military uniforms marching in the foreground, shows how images were combined to tell a story and make a political point. The exhibition also includes Heartfield’s subsequent version, which includes the words Nach Zwanzig Jahren (Twenty Years Later).

Although Foto has many beautiful and memorable images — a fat industrialist bathing in his peaked cap; a miner, naked apart from a leather apron, working underground — there is more to enjoy than the pictures. “I have noticed several couples having heated discussions as they walk around,” says Herrmann. “No one can look at these photographs without having an opinion.”