In the Face of History
Barbican, EC2

For centuries artists from all over the world have been inspired by the suggestive hour of twilight, that transitory moment on the border between lightness and darkness that the French refer to as time entre chien et loup — the time when the domestic dog settles down inside us and its ancestor the savage wolf goes on the prowl. Composers, painters and writers, including Chopin, Whistler and Joyce, have tapped the romantic resonance of the twilight state. As Martin Barnes, the curator of photographs at the V&A and co-curator of a new show of twilight photography, points out, the allure of this magic moment has attracted increasing numbers of contemporary photographers in recent years.

It is rare, on entering an exhibition, to experience one’s awareness of real time and the outside world falling away so completely. The new V&A show, Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour, envelops the visitor so successfully that all sense of reality is shed. Stepping in from the bright light of midday, you enter an enchanting world of manufactured twilight. The floor and walls are white, and a single strip of blue lights casts a smoky veil over the space, setting the scene for an exhibition of unexpected beauty found in the twilight worlds of eight contemporary photographers.

Barnes and his co-curator, Kate Best, have gathered together works by Gregory Crewdson, Philip Lorca diCorcia, Robert Adams, Ori Gersht, Boris Mikhailov, the Australian Bill Henson and two emerging talents, Chrystel Lebas from France and Liang Yue from China. Many of these names are obvious choices, but they have done well to find the Mikhailov series, a beautiful photographic stream of consciousness taken at dusk in his home town of Kharkov in Ukraine in 1993. The images, portraying the everyday activities of ordinary people heading home at dusk, appear to be in blue and white and give off an eerie calm considering the harsh reality of life in post-Soviet Russia.

Robert Adams, who stands out as the only black-and-white photographer, is best known for his photographic lament from the 1970s on the disappearance of the sweeping American rural landscape. Here we see a less known but no less striking series, Summer Nights (1979-82), made along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Amid rapid urbanisation, Adams focuses on the sustaining beauty of the trees, the sky and the shape of the land, his choice of twilight giving him the chance to cover the familiar natural landscape with a veil. Unexpected new shapes, ghostly images of depth and surprise, are revealed. His prints are exquisite in their appetising patina of rich luminous browns and greys, and in their intimate portrayal of light and atmosphere.

The other surprise is the beautiful Abyss series by the young French photographer Chrystel Lebas. Her works were shot in forests in Germany, Japan, France, Spain and in the Savernake Forest in Wiltshire, all of them using a panoramic camera and long exposures to capture the effects of fading light. Beneath their luminous silver surfaces these photographs of darkening woods seem wistful, a comment on the human condition, on loneliness and isolation, perhaps even spiritual enchantment. Lebas works on the confluence of darkness and light, when light is at its most elastic and pliant, a time when new shapes, outlines and perspectives can be revealed. She shows that night-time is not just the same old world minus sunlight, but that it is a transformed phantom world with its own mysterious mood.

While the V&A show feels splendidly intimate, the Barbican has put on a magnificently ambitious and wide- ranging survey of European photography of the 20th century. Twenty-two photographers have been chosen, spread chronologically from Eugène Atget, who began photographing in 1887, to Wolfgang Tillmans, who was born in 1968. Between them, their photographic work records or reflects in some way most of the major political and social changes going on in the Continent during that dramatic century. But what marks these photographers out most of all is the fact that all of them were working on private, self-motivated projects. Not one of the many hundreds of photographs in this huge show has been commissioned, and this leads to a series of unusually personal portrayals of the lacerating historical events that were unfolding across Europe.

Within this elite band we find some predictable names: André Kertész, Brassaï, Robert Doisneau, Josef Sudek, Chris Killip, Boris Mikhailov, Ed van der Elsken and Tillmans. But from within this high-profile group, the curators Kate Best and Mark Sladen have extracted lesser-known images, revealing surprising aspects of these photographers whom we thought we knew so well. The Kertész room focuses on the build-up to and the start of the First World War but also contains, for example, a series of enchanting small images showing the photographer with his brother. One of them, entitled My Brother as a Scherzo, taken in Hungary in 1919, shows his lithe and naked brother in silhouette, dancing on the horizon like an ecstatic elf.

Doisneau too is given the lateral treatment, represented here with a series of photographs of Resistance fighters in Paris in 1944. Resistance Fighter at Rest, for example, shows a ridiculously glamorous soldier, lying against a stone wall, a bandolier of bullets slung across his chest. If we saw this image in a magazine today we would assume that this silken-haired man with his chiselled brow was a model helping to flog a Ralph Lauren combat shirt. Other photographs, taken soon after the Liberation, celebrate the working classes of the outer suburbs of Paris and the emergence of delicate rays of hope in arenas very close to Doisneau’s own personal values and experiences.

Killip’s work charts the gradual isolation and decimation of poor communities in the North West of England suffering from the effects of Thatcherite de-industrialisation. During the 1980s Killip lived with a community that had survived on scavenging bits of coal off a Northumberland beach near a colliery. His photographs of women and children, their fingers blackened from their work, is a potent record of the medieval existence in which these people struggled.

Slotted in among these known names are photographers whose work has barely been shown in this country, such as Henryk Ross, who photographed the Jewish community living in the ghetto in Lodz in the 1940s. Ross documented the colossal cruelties and depravities meted out to Jews by the Nazis, and buried his negatives in a barrel deep in the ground, coming back after the war to retrieve and exhibit the photographs. Only a couple of years ago Ross’s son released a further selection of contemporaneous photographs that his father had withheld, showing aspects of his life as a privileged member of the Jewish elite favoured for the work he did producing the propaganda and identity photographs demanded by the Germans.

Inta Ruka, a Latvian photographer, spent every summer between 1984 and 1998 documenting the lives of people in the country village where she grew up, their worlds indirectly affected by the Cold War and its end. Changes occur in the lifestyles that we encounter, but also in the personalities and their surroundings, which turn from a timeless European rural existence to something less certain in search of a more complex sophistication.

There are more ideas and more layers in this show than can possibly be discussed here, but the sexual revolution of the 1960s, flower power, the end of the Cold War and all its ramifications . . . it’s all there as seen through the very personal work of these photographers. This is a fascinatingly oblique portrait of the history of the 20th century.

Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour is at the V&A, London SW7 (020-7942 2000; www.vam.ac.uk), to Dec 17. In the Face of History: European Photographers in the 20th Century is at the Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891; www.barbican.org.uk), from Friday to Jan 28