No easy decision

PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW

The Citigroup Photography Prize 2004

This year's strong shortlist for the £20,000 prize features three heavyweights with long-established reputations. Americans Robert Adams and Joel Sternfeld take low-key pictures of local life which nonetheless speak of grand American narratives, while South African David Goldblatt takes images documenting the apartheid and post-apartheid worlds.

A previously unspoilt area of Denver is disappearing under a tide of suburbia and consumerism in Adams's stark black and white images. Supermarkets, bungalows and trailer parks are shown in a flat, uniform landscape, their monochrome monotony suggesting a sapping of life itself.

While Adams's photographs are restrained and small in scale, Sternfeld's colour images are large and always seem to be bathed in a golden glow. In his latest project, Sternfeld has taken pictures of a disused railway track that runs through Manhattan.

But while Adams's American wilderness has all but disappeared, Sternfeld's abandoned city railtrack is a piece of redundant industry that's being reclaimed by nature.

Meanwhile, the iniquities seen through Goldblatt's lens have produced a series of powerful images in which every white face - even those of the very young - manage to look somehow culpable.

This leaves odd-man-out Peter Fraser. The only Brit, Fraser takes beautifully lit, close-up images of mundane objects. But while lovingly created, this is a difficult shortlist for any photographer of the minutiae of inanimate objects to be up against.

The winner is announced on March 4. While Goldblatt makes a more immediate, gut impact, Sternfeld seems to be the critics' choice, but it's no easy decision.

Ends Mar 28, The Photographers' Gallery, 5 Great Newport Street WC2, Mon to Sun 11am to 6pm, free. Tel: 020 7831 1772. www.photonet.org.uk Tube: Leicester Square