Deutsche Borse Photography Prize, Photographers' Gallery, London

A particularly strong shortlist for this year's prize exhibition, launched this weekend, features artists who, although exhibiting diverse formal approaches - video, text-based work, portraiture, reportage - share a commitment to photography as agent of social change, and demonstrate how categories distinguishing fine art, documentary and commercial work are dissolving.

Viviane Sassen, art world darling for her dovetailing of fashion photography with cutting edge multimedia methods, abstracts the body to surreal and political effect, questioning the nature of self-image and identity. The Dutch artist is shortlisted for "Umbra", a series encompassing abstract photographs, drawings, poems and lightbox installations, where sculptural compositions of geometric forms in vibrant colours and deep shadows recall stark contrasts between light and dark remembered from her African childhood.

South African Zanele Muholi calls herself a "visual activist"; "Faces and Phases" reappropriates traditional portraiture to challenge stereotypical presentations of the black body. Muholi's depictions of gay and lesbian South Africans - individual, defiant, positive, confrontational, intimate - are accompanied by shocking testimonies of post-Apartheid homophobic violence.

In "Ponte City", Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse focus on a Johannesburg apartment block built for white sophisticates which became an immigrant refuge. After a regeneration project failed, the artists worked with residents through narrative photographs, architectural plans and archives to create a social portrait of a culture.

Nikolai Bakharev, a generation older than the other artists here, in the 1980s blurred boundaries between private and public with his photographs of families on Russian beach holidays. Tense yet spontaneous, the black and white images ostensibly observe propriety - nude photography was banned in Russia at the time - and celebrate holiday idylls, yet with undercurrents of subterfuge and eroticism: a mirror of political repression.

thephotographersgallery.com, 020 7087 9300, to June 7

Photograph: MAMM

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