Tate Modern has opened its newest photographic exhibition this week, Performing for the Camera, which focuses on seminal and pre-eminent lensers and the subject of performance.

Provocative, serious and sometimes comical areas are explored (depending on your perspective) while subtexts are revealed. Vintage prints, large-scale works, posters and even Instagram posts are grouped together to form and explore narratives of self-promotion, marketing, gender and identity—imagery from varying time periods encourage reflection on the distinct, historical contrasts between aforementioned themes.

500 images from over 50 contributors will exhibit. Artist and dissent Ai Weiwei, experimental filmmaker Eikoh Hosoe and photographer Masahise Fukase – who’s well-known for recording domesticity with his wife – are some of the many multidisciplinary artists present within the line-up.

Digital media has saturated pipelines of data with arguably mindless white-noise; this exhibition is an opportunity to step away from that and digest some true shots of image mastery.

Performing for the Camera opens at the Tate Modern 18 Feb – 12 June 2016. More information can be found here.

Top Image: Babette Mangolte, b. 1941; Trisha Brown, ‘Roof Piece’ 1973, 53 Wooster Street to 381 Lafayette Street, New York City, 1973, printed 2003; photograph, gelatin silver print on paper; courtesy the artist and BROADWAY 1602, New York, NY; copyright © 1973 Babette Mangolte, all rights of reproduction reserved.