Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present, at National Gallery - Seven magazine review The rest is grouped according to the genres of old-fashioned artistic theory. There is a room of portraits, containing some extremely ordinary photographic portraits, as well as one or two genuinely arresting pictures - notably, Craigie Horsfeld's hypnotisingly intense, large-scale picture of a man with a beard, Hernando Gomez, Calle Serrano, Madrid (2006), a homage to Velazquez printed on rough-toothed watercolour paper that gives the inks a subtlety of tone not often encountered in photographs. There's a room devoted to the human figure, in which Richard Learoyd's Man with Octopus Tattoo II (2011) stands out: the transfixing image of a man caught in the coils of his own tattoo, grabbing behind his back at the inky octopus which itself grabs forever at his frail flesh. Then there are rooms of still life, landscape, and "Tableaux," (shorthand for history painting). Sam Taylor Wood's time-lapse film of rotting fruit looks trite by comparison with the mute wonder of oranges and lemons painted by Goya's contemporary, Luis Melendez. None of the assembled landscape photographs begin to compete with the tiny monochrome explosion of a storm at sea painted by the Norwegian Romantic Peder Balke. Only Luc Delahaye can be said to have made a photographic contribution to history painting: his panorama of US Bombing on Taliban Positions, of 2001, shows nothing much, a stretch of wasteland over which the ghostly smoke of recent explosions still hovers; but it has a brooding quality that at least gives pause for thought. The truth is that very few photographers have ever produced images with the weight of thought and feeling found in the greatest paintings. The camera is certainly an artistic tool, and photos can certainly be works of art. But can they be works of art of the same order as paintings? Modern critical orthodoxy would say yes. But the real answer is no. Photography lacks the depth and heft, the thinking sense of touch, that painting possesses. That is why the greatest images of the last 150 years- the images people argue about, contest, return to again and again - are not photographs but paintings: Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed, Picasso's Guernica, Pollock's Autumn Rhythm, Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. The camera can do lots of things, but not those things. To Jan 20, www.nationalgallery.org.uk