You don't have to be struck with a dose of compassion fatigue to be slightly irritated by one aspect of the Gallery of Photography's Por- traiture and Identity show. The installation features 6,000 pictures of children, taken by Seamus Coleman and Tara Farrell as part of a UN effort to reunite children with the families they lost after the war in Rwanda.

The images, each one only slightly larger than passport-size, fill the gallery's main exhibition space with a loose grid of smiles, grimaces, winks and occasionally defiance. The pictures do not stress terror, nor do they seek one resounding example to make a fast but essentially fatuous point.

It is not the work within the gallery that irks. These photos, after all, seem to exist in a way that has little in common with standard media values. Instead, the photographers have made use of the large numbers and the small picture format to suggest an individuality which media coverage usually misses.

The largest photograph in the show, however, seems to fall into the most obvious of traps. Ones child's photograph has been singled out to be blown up to larger than lifesize and is placed at the entrance to the show. This child, unlike the vast majority of the others, is apparently helpless with distress. Great tears roll down its face as it looks out of the frame in supplication. To place this huge, coercive, plaintive image as the introduction to a show of some apparent sophistication and subtlety is counter-productive, if not entirely destructive.

Until September 16th.