The exhibition includes about 60 paintings and photographs, including landmark works by painters such as Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon and Gerhard Richter, as well as photographers like Dorothea Lange, Jeff Wall and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Lead curator Gregor Muir describes the show as a “poetic wandering” that demonstrates how “both art forms attempt to capture fleeting points in time or moments in history.”

The first room surrounds Lange’s iconic portrait of the downtrodden “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California” (1936) with paintings by Picasso, Bacon, Lucian Freud and Alice Neel. “It’s allowed to be on its own in that room to sort of defy painting,” Muir says, “and to show that we’re now dealing with a medium which is becoming ever more knowing, ever more able to challenge painting on its own terms.”

Picasso’s Cubist painting “Weeping Woman” (1937), which he based on a photograph of a woman holding her dead child during the Spanish Civil War, is accompanied by a quotation pointing to the Spanish painter’s preoccupation with photography. The new medium, Picasso said, was “at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject… So shouldn’t painters profit from their newly acquired liberty to do other things?”

Bacon, who often held Picasso up as an exemplar, used photographic material as the source for most of his work. The exhibition includes his 1965 triptych “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” which he based on photographs of his friend and rival painter.

As the 20th century continued, painters moved away from photography to explore abstraction and the material qualities of paint. But a sort of reconciliation between the two art forms emerges in the photorealistic paintings of the German artist Gerhard Richter. Richter has said that he developed his style in the 1960s by projecting copies of photographs onto canvas, tracing them in pencil and finally filling them out in paint. The Tate Modern show includes “Aunt Marianne” (1965), Richter’s haunting, slightly blurred painting based on photograph of himself as a four-month-old boy sitting in the lap of his 14-year-old aunt.

As painters like Richter drew inspiration from photography, photographers such as Jeff Wall and Hiroshi Sugimoto began to manipulate their images to make them seem increasingly painterly. Wall’s photograph “A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)” (1993) depicts four figures caught in a sudden gust of wind that has swept across the open landscape. The meticulously staged composition, based on a woodcut by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, took Wall over a year and a hundred separate shots to complete.

The exhibition also includes four of Sugimoto’s black-and-white seascape photographs from the early 1990s. Sugimoto has referred to these works as “time exposed” on account of his technique of long exposure, whereby light slowly burns into the prints to produce an image. “They are very beautiful, almost wistful and traditional seascape images that we might be used to through sublime pictorial painters who preceded Sugimoto by many decades, if not hundreds of years,” Muir says.

The last two rooms of the exhibition consider how contemporary figurative artists like Michael Armitage, Salman Toor and Miriam Cahn draw inspiration for their topical paintings from the prevalence of digital media images, both photographic and televisual. Toor’s 2015 painting “9PM, The News” depicts a family sitting around the dining table watching the television. “It’s a wonderful painting, which shows the ubiquitousness of news media and how we are suspended in a world of imagery that has become infectious for today’s painters,” Muir says. “More and more we are seeing contemporary painters and photographers striving to be specific about a clear moment in time which has impacted on them.”