Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s, Barbican Art Gallery, review The common thread, we are told, is that these artists offer "a history of photography through the photography of history." Elsewhere we learn that they are purveyors of "personal landscape." But the great word that hangs over this exhibition - which it bend over backwards to avoid using - is photojournalism. All the photographers here relate, in one way or another, to that great tradition in which the photographer goes out to capture a slice of social reality in a stream of images that renders words superfluous. What this exhibition gives us, by and large - and without ever spelling it out - is photojournalists" personal work: not punchy stories grabbed in two or three day assignments, but projects that absorbed them over years, even decades, and pushed them to develop highly personal means of expression. Whatever the oddities of the show's conception, the cumulative effect of its artfully arranged, chapter-like sections is completely absorbing and often very moving. Beginning the exhibition with by far the largest number of images, David Goldblatt's portraits of isolated South African communities, such as the mining town of Randfontein where he grew up, taken in the depths of the apartheid era, have a kind of anguished impartiality. He concentrates on the humanity of the subject, and it's up to the viewer to provide context and judgement. From Goldblatt's stark black and white, we move to William Eggleston's queasily lush Southern Gothic colour. His almost accidental images of battered Mississippi motel rooms and lonesome gas stations aren't photojournalism in any conventional sense, but take the social essay form into almost novelistic territory. From there it's small geographic step, but a massive psychological leap to Bruce Davidson's epic stories of the Civil Rights struggle. With their freedom marchers trudging through rain and crowds of jeering rednecks, these deceptively modest images take you powerfully to a distant place and time. If the inclusion of photographers from other cultures might smack to some of political correctness, Li Zhensheng's panoramas of the Cultural Revolution and Shomei Tomatsu's studies of the impact of Americaisation on Japan compound the sense that these were extraordinary times wherever you were in the world. Two of the photographers appear to move away from photojournalism altogether: Boris Mikhailov, with his provocative superimposed images, and Sigmar Polke, who pours chemicals over his pictures of bear-baiting in Afghanistan. Yet even as he complicates the viewer's relationship to these disturbing images, Polke relates directly to the photo essays seen in classic photojournalistic magazines such as Picture Post. The Malian Malick Sidibe, on the other hand, was a studio photographer in a poor African suburb, who made personal studies of the local youth, suggesting that the compulsion to document social reality is perhaps intrinsic to the medium of photography. The curators" reluctance to associate such developments with photojournalism is perhaps partly down to intellectual snobbery: the idea that a great image is degraded by an association with mere journalism. Well you'd hardly expect a newspaper critic to endorse that. But it is useful to shuffle the accepted categories, to blur the distinctions between functional photography and art photography, between work that's commissioned and work that's seen as self-expression. Whatever you feel about this exhibition's rationale, its views of an era that feels at once recent and painfully remote will move you one way or another. Until 13 January