An empty chair is not, perhaps, what you might expect to find in a photography exhibition entitled Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography, yet it encapsulates the title perfectly. Upon closer inspection, you notice the shadow of its previous occupant, and suddenly you feel as if you’ve invaded someone’s space. Floris Neusüss’ playful title, ‘Be Right Back’, begins a journey into this superb exhibition in which all is not exactly as it seems.

Shadow Catchers explores the work and techniques of five contemporary artists – Floris Neusüss, Pierre Cordier, Garry Fabian Miller, Susan Derges, and Adam Fuss – each of whom has over twenty years’ experience of making pictures without a camera. Extraordinary in their diversity of style and media, these artists capture the quintessence of that moment of creation: fixing images onto a surface.

Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs at the V&A, spoke last week at the History of Art graduate seminar series. As the curator, he explained his vision behind the exhibition: the desire to design a “labyrinthine space” in which the space itself is a mysterious journey. The eight-foot tall walls create a feeling of intimacy through which the visitor can explore the mini retrospectives of each artist, and in the centre, a brilliantly-crafted film illustrates the motivations behind their techniques. Structured chronologically, the exhibition strives to make your imagination work to see the layers of meaning beneath each piece.

One of the most striking aspects of this exhibition is the sheer physicality of the images. They are all one-of-a-kind, size-specific works that challenge the boundaries of our perceptions of photography. Barnes explained how they alter the role of the photographer into that of agent through which “Nature draws herself”. What sets these techniques apart is the fact that camera-less pictures show what never really existed.

As the opening artist, Neusüss demonstrates this with a work that echoes the history of photography itself. His ‘Homage to Talbot’ was commissioned specifically for Shadow Catchers, and presents a stunning image of the latticed window that was the subject of the first photographic negative. The stark fragility of the final artist’s butterfly daguerreotype simultaneously evokes familiarity and distance, and Fuss’ emblematic images are a fitting end to the journey. Step inside this camera-less world and I can guarantee you will be transformed – or, at least, transported into the unexpected.

The exhibition runs until 20 February 2011; see the V&A website for more information: www.vam.ac.uk.