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In autumn 1969, the Magnum photographer Charles Harbutt unveiled a ground-breaking multimedia project. Conceived the year before – the year of Martin Luther King's and Bobby Kennedy's assassinations, the deepening chaos of the Vietnam War, and bloody civil rights protests and citywide riots – his aim was to hold a mirror up to the US and force its citizens to confront some ugly home truths. It consisted of a photography exhibition at the Riverside Museum in New York, with an accompanying book. The title pulled no punches: it was called America in Crisis.

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Working in collaboration with Magnum's New York bureau chief Lee Jones, Harbutt had scoured the agency's archives for recent photographs that could speak to his theme. Reportage from Vietnam by Don McCullin and Philip Jones Griffiths sat alongside photojournalism by Harbutt and others of protests against the war. In a section entitled The Deep Roots of Poverty, Constantine Manos's unflinching depictions of the lives of African-American sharecroppers contrasted surreally with pictures of advertising shoots and strip clubs in more prosperous parts of the country. The portrait was of a nation apparently tearing itself apart, if not eating itself alive.

Given the turbulent events of the past few years, from Covid-19 to the riot at the US Capitol, perhaps it's no surprise that London's Saatchi Gallery has decided to stage an updated version of America in Crisis. The new exhibition brings a selection of images from the 1969 exhibition into dialogue with ones by 40 American photographers working now – a time shadowed by protests against police violence and racial injustice, anguished debates about democracy and representation, economic and social tumult and the worsening effects of the climate crisis. The photographers and cast of characters may be different, the show implies, but in some senses, the US is always on the brink.

To mark its opening, co-curators Sophie Wright and Gregory Harris of Atlanta's High Museum of Art walked BBC Culture through a selection of images from the exhibition.