Med for the head...

'All my wife has ever taken from the Mediterranean - from that whole, vast intuitive culture - are four bottles of Chianti to make into lamps and two china condiment donkeys labelled Sally and Peppy.'

Ah, the Mediterranean, temple of the gods and seat of ancient civilisation whose debasement is so memorably summed up in Peter Shaffer's play Equus.

Although there's not much here in the way of souvenir tat (no ashtrays painted with scenes of the locale snapped by Martin Parr), our changing perceptions of a region stretching from Southern France to North Africa and North-West Asia is a subject ripe for treatment.

Reality is, of course, a shifty concept. In Marc Räder's photographs, the newly built tourist residences of Mallorca, as yet unoccupied, offer up eerie scenes that suggest architects' models against the 'real' backdrop of land and sea.

But then, perhaps the 'real' has never meant much. In Bleda and Rosa's photographs of Knossos, we see fragments of buildings that were excavated and rebuilt in the 19th century, giving us an idealised Classicism that we now accept as authentic.

In contrast, Eric Fischl's garish images of San Tropez in the 1980s look all too real, as do the scenes we don't get in the brochures, including Ad van Denderen's shots of desperate migrants crossing the sea as human cargo.

Until Oct 3, The Photographers' Gallery, 5 & 8 Great Newport Street WC2, Mon to Sat 11am to 6pm (Thu to 8pm), Sun noon to 6pm, free. Tel: 020 7381 1772. Tube: Leicester Square