Adrian Searle: Out of Sight

If, like painting, photography holds up a mirror to the world, it is a mirror that has always been broken. Photographs are nothing but shards. A prison wall, a proud hunter with a deer he has shot, a baby, a yellow star sewn on a jacket, an aerial shot of a couple having sex in a flat landscape, a close-up of a begrimed miner in Silesia, a farmer smoking: we may feel that photographs capture a world entire but they are always figments and fragments, however iconic they may become. And if, like the smiling whores in some of Brassaï's photographs, we feel as though we've seen it all, how come we are never satisfied, and always want to look again? What more do we hope to see?

Between 1968 and 1975, the Ukrainian Boris Mikhailov took every random sighting of the colour red as his subject: red flags at party marches, a red skirt, a red bra being removed, a red carnation in a conscript's hand, red sunburn, red armbands and a red boil that has burst on a woman's thigh. From these random flashes of red, a world begins to coalesce. Tease any thread and the world unravels.

Like a long interrogation, or a painful psychoanalysis, the works gathered here take us over much of the same old material, the same old ground we always traverse whenever we think of the history of photography in the 20th century. It is as though we were searching for a break: the flaw, the way in, the final explanation. But there isn't one, and history will never give us a break.