A broader focus on art

The Photography Prize has a new sponsor - hence the name change - and an increased award of £30,000. The Deutsche Borse Photography Prize at The Photographers' Gallery has also broadened out.

Now more international in scope, nominations are made on the basis of exhibitions and publications held anywhere in Europe in the past 12 months.

Despite changes, however, one thing remains constant. It is still the most interesting and prestigious prize of its kind in this country.

We kick off with French photojournalist Luc Delahaye, whose panoramic images provide strangely restrained images of war, conflict and redress.

A debris-strewn street in Baghdad broods under a veil of smoke; a burial at Musenyi in Rwanda is flanked by a long, convex line of mourners; Milosevic sits dead centre in an office-like courtroom during a recess (his expression is unreadable, perhaps a mixture of anxiety and boredom as he waits for the bureaucratic wheels of justice to grind on).

These are pictures that manage to make moments in history look as arbitrary and as accidental as they might actually be.

There's too much of a sense of deja vu in the pictures of American road photographer Stephen Shore. Although these downbeat images have only just been published in a new book - an updating of the 1982 Uncommon Places - all were taken in the 1970s.

The gas stations, diners, highways, clapped-out cars and motel rooms tell a familiar story that's been better explored by the likes of William Eggleston. Surely the competition should be restricted to work executed within a shorter time span.

For me, the German Jorg Sasse is the weakest link. He doesn't take his own photographs but digitally manipulates found ones.

The choices are deliberately banal and bland: motorways, suspension bridges and a football pitch viewed through the grid of a wire fence. It's high-concept stuff but desperately old hat.