Lyrical images that haunt and provoke
If photography is today's punk rock - the DIY art-form that everyone can practise - the Jerwood Prize is modern classical music. Its winners - UK-based Visual Arts graduates - receive £2,500 each, and present fresh, weighty stories enveloped in deceptively beautiful guises.
Edmund Kevill-Davies's Puppet Love is suffused in the bright colours of seaside postcards appropriate for the ventriloquists' dummies he poses in static family portraits, an eerie take on family relationships.
The other four exhibitors represent the new photo-journalism: less explicit, more lyrical than the Magnum school. Kevin Newark's Protoplasm is a series of still lifes of plastic bags floating in London canals. They resemble spectral jellyfish but represent environmental disaster. Similarly, Sophie Gerard's E-wasteland studies of dumped electronics in India. She finds gorgeous autumnal colours in rusting circuit boards and iridescence in toxic puddles that boys run through in sandals.
Dana Popa's Not Natasha applies an artful touch to a study of Moldavian girls who escaped the sex industry. In hauntingly quiet vignettes, she depicts a girl whose mother sold her into prostitution pinned down by depression on her bed, and another lying under a sheet in a gynaecological ward, exposing only a cascade of hair.
The mood lightens with Moira Lovell's After School Club, which cruelly dresses adult waitresses in school ties and suspenders outside their alma maters.
A quietly provocative exhibition whose messages are delivered with light hands and artists' brushes, it leaves stark messages hanging - like those plastic bags.
Until 9 December (0131 220 1911, www.jerwoodvisualarts.org).
Jerwood Photography Awards 2007
Jerwood Space
Union Street, SE1 0LN
