Is it possible to paint like a camera? Why would you want to paint like a camera? In the 1960s many artists wanted to make paintings that looked like the work of a machine. Andy Warhol began silk screening photographic imagery on to canvas. Gerhard Richter developed a technique of feathering a wet brush over the surface of a painting to blur the underlying image to mimic the variable focus of a photograph.

This desire by painters to develop a new photographic realism began as a reaction to abstract expressionism. Their subjects were distance, detachment and alienation – an indication of how divorced from experience the citizens of a media-saturated world were feeling. Not much has changed in the intervening period. Is it surprising, then, that the photorealists are ever more prodigiously productive?

The Painting of Modern Life, at the Hayward, is a rangy, somewhat dry and almost indecently diverse exhibition of more than 100 paintings by 22 painters, the oldest being Richard Hamilton, the youngest Wilhelm Sasnal, born in 1972 in Poland. The subject matter is equally rambling; we have a Jackie Onassis lookalike by Gerhard Richter hung close to an American bomber aircraft by Vija Celmins, which is not far from a Hockney boy about to take a shower and a Venetian tourist scene by Johanna Kandl.

Painters have used photographs as aids ever since the 1830s, but this idea of painting like a camera was a deliberate attempt to undermine the conventions of realism in a far less obvious fashion. These painters are adept at conflating flatness and illusionism, giving the viewer a vertiginous feeling of shifting between a sense of depth and the reality of a two-dimensional plane.

You feel thrown off balance by the meticulous magnification of small photographs, allowing the intimacy of the original photograph to be preserved, but on the giddying scale of a huge historical painting.

The results are often surreal, even hallucinogenic, because you find yourself confronted with apparently familiar imagery that has been made strange in some way. Shapes have been bent, details altered. How far, for example, has Eberhard Havekost strayed from the original photograph scanned into his computer as the source for his painting, National Geographic?

Richter’s paintings are based on photographs but are still beautifully nuanced with variegated surfaces and layers of information that invite the eye to linger. There are some fine works by Luc Tuymans, and Malcolm Morley’s work is extraordinary. Elizabeth Peyton’s Arsenal, based on a photograph of Prince Harry at a football match not long after his mother’s death, is brutally striking, whereas Peter Doig’s Lapeyrouse Wall, a curious conflation of two photographs, has the opposite, calming, effect. Box office: 0871 663 2501

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