American Photographs

In 1908 Lewis Hine photographed Rush Merrill, a 12-year-old worker at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, smiling for the camera. In the same room, Justine Kurland has taken a knife to Lee Friedlander's book Nudes and rearranged the cut-out limbs into a rose.

The display takes its title from Walker Evans's 1938 book, and you can see the copy itself in Room 100. Around it are more than 300 photographs, publications and cameras from 1840 to now, drawn from one of the largest collections of American photography outside North America. Room 100 has Cindy Sherman in costume as an 18th-century sitter, An-My Lê's New Orleans street with its Confederate monument and Diana Matar's empty sites of police killings.

It's a survey, and some of it is hard going, from child labour to the murder ballads behind Kristine Potter's photographs of creeks and dusty trails. It's free with no booking, in Rooms 100 and 101 of the Photography Centre, until 16 May 2027.