The black stuff

If a photography exhibition opens with a quartet of images by Lee Miller, Robert Frank, Bill Brandt and Don McCullin, the odds are that it's going to be worth a visit - and sure enough Dark Tales: British Documentary Photography And The Gothic justified the journey over to Bristol from Cardiff. The theme may be loose, but any attempt by the Martin Parr Foundation to make good use of their archive and show off their collection should be applauded.

The exhibition is divided into four sections, with the abovementioned four images all featuring in the first and most visually impressive, "The Castle". An Englishman's home is his castle, or so the saying goes, and Miller's picture of the devastation wrought on London houses by a German bomb during the Blitz illustrates that even castles aren't impregnable - the wrecked piano in the foreground underlying the war's considerable impact on culture.

For the most part, however, this section depicts self-inflicted wounds: the damaging effects of heavy industry on both places and people. The rapacious, exploitative attitude to land and resources is starkly illustrated by McCullin, who captured a woman pushing a gleaming new pram through a bleak post-industrial hellscape in County Durham, while images from Janine Wiedel's Vulcans Forge take us inside the one of the dark Satanic mills (a steelworks in Stoke) so effectively you can practically feel the grime and intense blasting heat. Graham Smith's "Thirty Eight Bastard Years on the Furnace Front" shows a worker hunched over in the mess room of a Middlesbrough ironworks, a broken man. Humans are just another expendable resource, chewed up and ground down.

Not that home offers much more comfort. The second section, "Domestic Bliss", is ironically titled, but less coherent and therefore less effective than the first. It would, I think, have benefitted from one of Tish Murtha's Byker photos, or an example of Nick Hedges' work on substandard housing, or maybe even one of Parr's own nauseatingly lurid food portraits. That said, Parr is at least represented by an image from 1988's The Cost Of Living depicting a Tory fundraising bash - a cucumber-sandwiches-and-Pimms-style genteel garden party held to boost the coffers of a political party that was actively seeking to widen the wealth gap and introduced Section 28 that very year.

This hint of what horrors might lurk beneath a ostensibly respectable exterior helps to cast a pair of pictures by John Myers in a different, more troubling light. On the surface, they are simply of a row of garages and a double bed - but you find yourself searching for deeper meaning, for something hidden, and uneasily speculating about what may have happened in those lock-ups or between those sheets.

As such, they lead neatly into "Double Take", the most unsettling of the four sections. We're immediately confronted with Gilles Peress' gruesome photo of a Bloody Sunday victim, reminiscent of Letizia Battaglia's work in Sicily. The Troubles feature heavily - whether through Akihiko Okamura bringing his outsider's perspective to bear on a blaze in Derry or through Donovan Wylie's portraits of cells in the notorious Maze prison, where only the curtains change from room to room, conveying the rigid dehumanising impersonality of the carceral system.

The mood lightens somewhat for the final section, "Night Creatures", featuring John Bulmer's images of students (presumably) scaling college buildings from 1958's The Night Climbers Of Cambridge and Derek Ridgers' portraits of punters from the short-lived but hugely influential early 1980s Soho goth club the Batcave. The outfits are outlandish, the make-up is extravagant and the backcombed barnets are impossible - and as a bonus there's a book to buy that serves as a suitable souvenir of the show.