The latest exhibition at Tate Modern repurposes the classic philosophical question: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” It asks instead: “If an artistic performance takes place with no camera to record it did it happen?” The implied answer is that the presence of the camera changes everything.

This vast show of more than 500 photographs looks at the complex relationship between performance art and the lens over the past 150 years. It starts with Nadar’s studio portraits of Charles Debureau playing Pierrot in 1854 and runs up to the Instagram age (Amalia Ulman taking pictures specifically for social media). There are really two types of relationships examined: photographic records of artistic happenings and performances designed and staged explicitly for the camera.

Into the first category fall photographs by Harry Shunk and János Kender of Yves Klein in 1960 directing a series of naked models as they cover themselves in blue paint and press themselves on canvases. An audience is present, as is a string orchestra with Klein as the conductor of the whole affair. Or Andy Warhol’s six photographs of Keith Haring painting a naked Grace Jones in Australian aboriginal symbols.

Into the second fall a bewildering array of artistic ephemera made permanent by the camera’s presence. Cindy Sherman takes the roles of Hollywood heroines; Eikoh Hosoe photographs the dancer Tatsumi Hijikata gamboling like a malign folklore spirit in the Japanese countryside; Samuel Fosso, a commercial portrait photographer from the Central African Republic, takes grave self-portraits while dressed up as Martin Luther King or Haile Selassie... the variations are endless – although it is not always clear what is a performance and what is more uninflected posing for the camera.

The results throughout are mixed. Many of the pictures were meant to be seen in sets (such as the 80 photographs by Masahisa Fukase showing himself half-submerged in his bath) but it means that the potency of individual images is lost in the ensemble. As a result, the quality of each frame is not as high as it would be were they stand-alone pictures. This fecundity smacks of self-indulgence too since it is far from clear how the pictures are meant to be read; they can be like a bande dessinée without a narrative. Other pictures are taken from advertising (posters showing Warhol or Joseph Beuys) or ape fashion photography (Ervin Wurm’s pictures of Claudia Schiffer in a trenchcoat toying with food). There is nothing new about pointing out that advertising and fashion ape the art world.

Nevertheless, among the plethora of works on show the central message comes across loud and clear: the camera changes the way artists present both themselves and their work.

“Performing for the Camera” is at Tate Modern from February 18 through June 12, 2016.