The Guardian has published a sharply critical review of "Remember Me," a photographic survey spanning two centuries, and its verdict is memorable: the critic compares the show's narrow scope to "a history of food in three ham sarnies."

The analogy carries the review's central charge. Two hundred years of photography cannot, the argument runs, be condensed into a handful of representative works without flattening the medium's richness into something meagre. A sandwich or three may satisfy hunger; it hardly constitutes a history of food.

What is the criticism about?

The review's complaint is one of curatorial compression. Any exhibition that sets out to cover the full arc of photography — from its earliest practitioners to contemporary image-making — faces a structural problem: breadth demands selection, and selection this drastic risks reducing the medium's diversity to a token sample.

For a survey covering two photographic centuries, the reviewer suggests, the chosen works function less as a representative history than as a thin cross-section. The "ham sarnies" line is the review's most quotable judgment, and it frames the show as undernourished rather than ambitious.

Why does this matter for photography surveys?

Institutional surveys of photography carry particular weight. They shape which photographers, periods and practices enter the public understanding of the medium's history. A narrow survey, in this reading, does not merely disappoint visitors — it quietly narrows the canon itself.

The criticism also speaks to a familiar tension in exhibition-making: the temptation to tell a grand, tidy story versus the messier reality of photographic practice across eras, formats and geographies. The Guardian's reviewer comes down firmly against the tidy version.

The review's skeptical tone is worth noting at a moment when museums increasingly reach for sweeping, crowd-pleasing surveys of the medium. Whether "Remember Me" sparks a broader debate about how photographic history gets packaged — and whether institutions respond with more generous curatorial appetites — remains the question its critics will be watching.