Worlds apart: who has the best shot at winning the Deutsche Börse prize?

The 2012 Deutsche Börse photography prize shortlist is an intriguing one, not least because of the range of styles and subject matter broached by the four nominees. Interestingly, two of the photographers, Japan's Rinko Kawauchi and South Africa's Pieter Hugo , are nominated for work presented in book form, while both of the photographers nominated for their exhibitions, Britain's John Stezaker and Christopher Williams from the US, are not photographers per se, but conceptual artists who use photography in their practice. Stezaker, who had a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery earlier this year, collects old photographs – movie stills, publicity shots, postcards, book and magazine illustrations – slices them in two, then splices them with other cut pictures to create something altogether new and often slightly disturbing. He is an artist of the uncanny who takes his cue from political mischief-makers like the situationists as much as from surrealists. Williams, as the title of his recent show, Kapitalistischer Realismus, suggests, is even more cerebrally political (or politically cerebral?). He studied under the conceptual pioneer, John Baldessari, in the 1970s, and this recent body of work was informed by the iconography of the capitalist realism movement which included German artists like Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. He describes it as "a period piece about the cold war … that raises the question what would capitalist realism be today?" Images include a bunch of apples, a camera cut in half and an empty window. According to Brett Rogers, director of the Photographers' Gallery, which hosts the prize, Williams "continuously questions the aesthetic conventions and communication tools that influence our perception of reality." Well, perhaps. I was much more excited by the inclusion of two of my personal favourites: Pieter Hugo and Rinko Kawauchi, whose work could not be more different. Hugo is nominated for his book, Permanent Error , which records life on the biggest and most lethally toxic dump for technological waste in Ghana in a series of portraits and post-apocalyptic landscapes that are powerful emotionally and formally. Kawauchi was chosen for her book, Illuminance, in which she does what she has always done: record the minutiae of everyday life in images that are both keenly observational and somehow heightened in their extraordinary sense of intimacy. No one else makes photographs like this, and, over her several beautiful books, they amount to a kind of sustained intimate reportage that continues to intrigue and enthrall this viewer. Decision time. The judges' verdict seldom chimes with my wishful thinking – Jim Goldberg's win, this year, was the exception to that rule – but, for the record, my heart says Kawauchi, but my head says Hugo. As is often the case with the Deutsche Börse prize, I may well be shaking my head in bemusement when the winner is announced next year.