Light from the Middle East: New Photography, V&A, review This grandly claims to be the first major museum exhibition of contemporary Middle Eastern photography. Sadly, it's not only a very slight show, but one that is interesting for all the wrong reasons. It spans the years 1978 to the present day, opening with a selection of eight photojournalistic shots by Abbas, the best-known photographer here. Abbas turned Tehran's revolution-stricken streets into black and white theatre for his "Iran Diaries" and went on to become the first non-Western "full Member" of Magnum in 1998. Among his shots is a photograph of a group of roused young men burning a portrait of the Shah on the pavement in 1978. This act of iconoclasm sets the tone for the exhibition. What comes next is not a survey of the development of Middle Eastern photography, but an apparently apolitical conceptual art exhibition intent on proving - through a curatorial language of conceptual art that was invented in the West - that photography is a dangerous and untrustworthy medium. The artists chosen here celebrate not a language of "light" (as the title suggests) but one of predictable culture clashes and untruths. The show is divided thematically, not chronologically, and most of the works date to post-September 11 2001. Many of the photographs are deliberately staged or photoshopped. One of them, called Markings II by Camille Zakharia, is a photograph of a white line painted on a road which has been copied and pasted in a patterned montage. A wall blurb quotes the artist: "Through the use of montage I have rebelled against the photo medium itself." I wonder if this can be a healthy focus for an exhibition that also features work by photographers, like Abbas, which is still banned in their own countries. Given that there are artists from 13 countries represented here, the overall picture is disturbingly homogenous. The majority of photographs serve only to cement further the clichés that riddle Western perceptions of contemporary art in the Middle East: women in burkas touting guns; women in burkas wearing sunglasses; women in burkas with doctorates. Where, for example, is the searching intelligence of Iranian landscape photographer Shirana Shahbazi who, in her 2000 series Goftare Nik, set out to counter the West's preconceptions of her country with some extraordinary shots of new highways, power lines, Tehran's slickly modernising infrastructure? More than half of the artists featured in the exhibition are living, or have lived (and studied), in Western countries, including England, France and the USA; two of them were born in Western countries. Given this scope, I don't know why they couldn't have included the work of someone like Sophie Reistelhueber, the French photographer whose 1991 photographs of the Kuwait deserts after the Gulf War are terribly pastiched here. The show features 87 of the 95 Middle Eastern photographs that have been collected by the British Museum and the V&A over three years, with funding help from the Art Fund. In 2009, the year the British Museum and the V&A, began to collect Middle Eastern photography, I attended a very interesting talk at the British Museum about how the world's post-9/11 interest in the Arab world had sparked an acceleration of art production there. "Responding to a fad can be a damaging thing for art," said curator Saleh Barakat. The same goes for collecting, it would seem. Until April 7 2013