Arts: Exhibitions - It's All Gloss in the East End This Year's Whitechapel Open Is Full of Big, Sophisticated, Socially Uneasy Photographic Images. Just like the World outside Its Walls

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THE WHITECHAPEL OPEN has become such a big event that it is nowadays held in other venues as wellas the Whitechapel Art Gallery itself. This year, parts of the show are at Canary Wharf (in quite a nice space above the Tesco supermarket) and on the other side of the river at The Tannery, Bermondsey Street, a former industrial building now used as artists' studios. It takes hours to travel around these three sites, and inevitably the feeling is of three different exhibitions, two of them subsidiary to the main event in the parent gallery.

The Whitechapel staff, however, have been careful in how they have distributed the strongest work. Tucked away in an unlovely corner …