Minoru Hirata is perhaps best known for his brilliantly intense accounts of Japanese performance art – particularly the Neo-dada groups, Hi-Red Centre and Zero Dimension. However, his photographic record of performance art reveals a more complex and sophisticated perspective than one would usually expect from straightforward documentation. As well recording the activities of the Japanese avant-gardes, Minoru Hirata was a committed photographer in his own right, his principal subject being the island of Okinawa, (occupied by the USA between 1945 and 1972). Minoru Hirata’s work in Okinawa, from the 1960s to the present day, is as sensitive, engaged and original as his better-known performance-related practice: showing the same experimental confidence and originality in relation to the politics of everyday life, (under occupation and otherwise), as he did to the spectacular world of the avant-garde.

Mark Ruwedel makes work in the desert regions of the Western United States, much of which concerns the impacts of human activity on the landscape. His work offers both an absolute commitment to the formal language and potential of the large-format camera, and a deep commitment to the aesthetic potential of print-production. His work is as conceptually ambitious as it is geographically wide-ranging, drawing on the precision of the new-topographic tradition, but overlaying this approach with his own unique perspective on the troubled relationship between the natural environment and the inevitable consequences of economic expansion.

Indre Serpytyte’s work examines issues of memory, trauma and loss, through the post-war and recent history of her native Lithuania, using a sophisticated combination of archival research, sculpture and photography. Her project 1944-1991 is exemplary in this regard, beginning with a series of photographs of sites of repression and violence, which then form the basis for her own complex and nuanced negotiations and representations of these same places. Working within and between media, her work nonetheless displays a great commitment to the specific histories and critical potential of the photographic medium.

• Chris BOOT

Christopher Clary made an installation for an exhibition called Gay Men Play that I put together for the New York Photo Festival in 2009, about the use of photography by gay men as a tool for communicating about sex. The room he created, wallpapered with images he collected and output from his hard drive, was smart and affecting. But his work is only partly about photographs as social and sexual currency. In publicly exploring his desire for a particular photographic archetype of manhood, and the male nude, Clary poignantly mines issues of sexual fiction, self-confidence and male vulnerability.

Although making photographs is a central part of David Horvitz’s work—whether made by him or by others whom he prompts—they are the opposite of refined art objects. Rather, the pictures are like postcards, exchanges between him and his audience, souvenirs of his interventions in the world, of getting his audience to think like conceptual or performance artists, and play. He wants people to pay attention to their environment differently—a virtual land artist of the interactive age—and he leaves barely a trace behind. His enquiry into the nature of photography reminds me of Duane Michals and Keith Arnatt.

Penelope Umbrico’s typologies of everyday descriptive photographs, made in their thousands and posted online, are detached anthropological observations about people, things that matter to them, and their behaviour. At the same time, they are the art of a scavenger, who finds photographs and groups and displays them in ways that are entirely personal to her. Like the others I nominated for the Discovery Award, Umbrico makes provocative and original work, engaged with and about the phenomenon of photography as it is now, a language used by almost all of us, to traffic social meaning online.

• LE POINT DU JOUR - David Barriet, David Benassayag, Béatrice Didier

Lynne Cohen’s images focus systematically on interiors without people, deploying a rigorous minimalism that contrasts often with kitsch settings and sometimes with some incongruous detail or incomprehensible relationship between objects. The harder you look, the more you feel a sneaking disquiet: firstly because of the physical constraints implicit in the places shown, and then because of the images themselves, with their mixed intimations of equipment catalogues and art installations. These frontal, imposingly framed shots always have a hidden secret: something utterly trivial or very serious seems camouflaged inside them, just as the pictures themselves seem like camouflage—but of what intentions, and what realities?

Most of Rut Blees Luxemburg’s pictures are night views of enormous buildings and abandoned urban spaces. The city and civilisation are laid bare in their infrastructures, in their nooks and crannies, as if we were backstage in a theatre. No human figures are to be found here, but this is no icy report on today’s inhumanity, either: on the contrary these images are imbued with some vital force, like fragments of dreams where intensely contrasting sensations—fear and desire, madness and rationality—coalesce in an irresistible personal vision.

Joachim Mogarra reinvents the world at home, photographing things he loves, cheap little bits and pieces he usually rounds off with a few handwritten words. Each is part of a thematic whole, of a collection or narrative inspired by the artist’s life. Faced with the flagrant discrepancy between the image and what it supposedly represents, and with these differences of scale and mixes of registers, we burst out laughing; but maybe these seemingly innocuous pictures are unsettling for our ways of seeing and thinking, too.

• Sam STOURDZÉ

When Jean-Luc Cramatte met Jacob Nzudie, the Yaoundé supermarket photographer, he was struck by the impact of a very ordinary activity. Their project gave rise to an attempt to account for a commercial activity with manifold ramifications. The photographer’s improbable studio was the aisles of the supermarket—for the important reason that it is a place of key social issues. The Yaoundé supermarket clearly sees itself as a place for people who have made it socially. Nzudie’s clients choose their favourite shelves carefully as a gauge of their uccess—their accession to the ranks of the consumer society. Proof of their status is the studied gaze of the photographer selling portraits—photographs whose repeated nature only increases the desire to appear in them; photographs which, because there are so many of them, add up to a vast sociological portrait. The infinite succession of portraits by Nzudie that Cramatte has chosen works the notion of a series dry. And when all artifice is down, it is photography itself which is on show. The alternative story it tells is that of a poor image in the shadow of a concrete jungle.

With every successive project, Raphaël Dallaporta restates his photographic creed. Antipersonnel was like a sales catalogue, glorifying mines from the neutrality of his studio in a military base. Domestic Slavery used a taut documentary strategy to treat the issue of slavery. On the right, the photographs, repetitive, impenetrable, the facade of the scene of the event; on the left, the text tells the story. Raphaël Dallaporta’s latest work took him to Afghanistan alongside a team of archaeologists working on an inventory of Afghan heritage. The photographer has been helping them map the sites. There have been many attempts at aerial photography since the nineteenth century. Nadar went up in a hot-air balloon. Dallaporta has built his own flying machine equipped with cameras. Using this technology, the photographer continues the photographic reflection of his predecessors. The shooting process is automated and the areas photographed are reconstructed by means of a powerful image-recognition algorithm. Dallaporta’s inquiring camera sees ruins as layers pushing back the remains of history. There is the ruin disarranged by modern conflicts; the ruin as scarified landscape accumulating the marks of time. The ruin of the future.

When Yann Gross has a yen to travel, he fixes a trailer to his moped, packs his things and sets off down the Valley of the Rhône. There, surrounded by mountains, a traditionally secular people has farmed and forced a living out of the land. It’s hard to imagine that on this land, some of them, having rejected the idea of ‘here’ have sought for themselves an ‘elsewhere’—an ‘elsewhere’ that is right here. The America they have created in cunning disguise, ‘here’, is the America of the pioneers, the conquerors of the land. And Yann Gross’s journey plays on all the ambiguities. It is constructed as a documentary leap into an imaginary community of people drawn together by an apparent certainty about their identity—an identity that is strengthened by the fact that it is local. Welcome to Horizonville.

• Arthur WALTHER

Domingo Milella’s photography shows us the physiognomy of a landscape as determined by its physical, anthropological, biological and ethnic characteristics resulting out of the constant action and interaction between nature and mankind. There is a layering of themes and periods, of structures and relics, of nature and manufactured, of the urban and the rural, of beauty and decay, of intimacy and distance, of modernity and antiquity, of the present and of the passage of time.

Jo Ractliffe’s photography is deeply rooted in landscape and its association with spaces that hold the memory of violence and loss. Her landscapes document that which is generally not noticed or accounted for; traces of a past no longer visible, it has to be imagined and is contingent on the viewer’s eye. Her images are mysterious, mythical and transcend the immediate appearance of everyday things.

Miklael Subotzky's photography is a study of social and economic dynamics, of a culture of fear and security, of power and of marginalised citizenry, a complex civic portrait. In this inquiry his engagement with his subjects is intimate and direct, yet unobstrusive, connected, empathetic. There is precision, complexity, diligence, a thoroughness and an intensity in pursuit of ideas and concepts.