Benjamin Stone, Horn Dance. Abbot's Bromley. Four of the Performers (1899). © Courtesy Birmingham Library & Archives Services

A massive collection of more than 500 images chosen to cumulatively represent a portrait of Britain of the last 150 years is now showing at Tate Britain. The major new photographic exhibition, How We Are: Photographing Britain, is running at the gallery until September 2 2007.

Since its inception, photography has occupied a unique position in the art world. Being both artwork and document is, in fact, its major strength, but also can often make its status ambiguous.

One of the most interesting things about this exhibition is the revelation that, after an initial period of exclusivity, the camera quickly became ‘proletarianised’ and, as such, almost invisible.

This exhibition does, of course, begin (at photography’s inception) with the famous usual suspects like Julia Margaret Cameron, Thomas Annan and Anna Atkins (who, in fact, didn’t even use a camera, but created miraculous and curious other-worldly silhouettes on sensitised paper).

Roger Mayne, Southam Street 1956-1961. © Victoria and Albert Museum

The curators do well to retain something of the sense of wonder of these earliest examples of the medium amid a sea of competing images of which they are, I suppose, the ancestors.

But the curators have moved beyond the superstars of the medium, to photos that, although not well known in their own right, are nonetheless instantly recognisable as a collection of cultural memories owned, if the sighs or recognition echoing around the exhibition were anything to go on, by us all.

Even if the history they depict isn’t part our personal story, there is something terribly ‘everyman’ about cold British beaches, 1960s streets and sitting rooms adorned with faux beams and horse brasses.

This isn’t a collection of clichés, however, far from it. Hung chronologically, these images are groups of snapshots of moments in time with the obvious scenes side-stepped in favour of less predictable moments.

Jason Evans - Strictly 1991. © Photograph by Jason Evans, styling by Simon Foxton

Jane Bown’s 1984 work Greenham Common and Paul Seawright’s brilliant Sectarian Murders (1988) (showing the sites – often beauty spots, or play parks - of sectarian murders along with newspaper commentary of the murder with the religion of the victim removed) are chosen in favour of the Poll Tax Riots or the Winter of Discontent.

The jagged presentation also speaks of the curators’ desire to avoid presenting the last 150 years of British history as a homogenous narrative, instead making a clear statement about the complexity of the story.

The title of the exhibition is telling: How We Are refers not only to the documentation of the lifestyles of a society, but its welfare. As one moves through the exhibition, there is a growing sense of unease. The viewer doesn’t have to descend to a mawkish sense of the reasonably distant past to be touched by an increasing depiction of tension and dissatisfaction.

Cecil Beaton, The Western Campanili of St Paul's Cathedral seen through a Victorian Shop Front 1940-1. © Courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby's

Nor can one fail to reflect on the work of photography in contemporary society. The sweet innocence of David Bailey’s Jagger as Venus in Furs contrast with the knowingness of Stephen Bull's series Meeting Hazel Stokes (1993) (in which Ms Stokes is depicted meeting a list of minor celebrities) and the enormous most recent images which, although they don’t depict contemporary celebrity, do allude to the enormous presence and power and financial worth of the photograph in contemporary society.

Underpinning the exhibition is the invitation for the public to contribute to the archive, by uploading their pictures of their Britain. Some 40 of these will be chosen to stay permanently in the Tate Online archive.

The success of this exhibition is a lightness of touch which is brilliantly democratic – no one is left feeling excluded from the cultural survey – without descending into cliché.

Wolfgang Suschitzky, Charing Cross Road: Man reading c1936-7. © the artist

The wonder of the development of the technology is undercut by the moral complexity it presents: compare the highly staged before and after portraits of Barnados boys and the surveillance of ‘Known Suffragettes’ (which in turn stand next to Christina Broom’s early photojournalist record of the famous Pankhursts).

This is a touching and delicate exhibition which is relentlessly charming and seductive, nostalgic, challenging and energetic. The curators have hit exactly the right tone and haven’t included a single misjudged image amidst the 500 odd.

The photograph, that stealthy medium, has something to offer everyone. And, ultimately, isn’t ‘How We Are’ the question of our age?