THE annual Jerwood Photography Awards was launched last year to reflect photography's status as "an essential medium for 21st century artists", and it is apt that the ever innovative Impressions Gallery should host the first exhibition.

The judging panel's chairman, Mark Haworth-Booth, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, deems photography to be "this wonderfully elastic medium, made even more elastic in the digital era".

Award winners Veronica Bailey, Polly Braden, Edgar Martins, Danny Treacy and Naglaa Walker do stretch the elasticity of photography, but more so in subject matter than in form.

Impressions has showcased far more experimental work than this comparatively conservative Jerwood show, and from a competition that drew more than 600 entrants, more experimentation with the possibilities of new media may have been expected. However, in the rush for technological and artistic advance, it is important to remember the twin towers of photographic strength: its stillness in the documentary moment and its powers of imparting meaning, whether overt or hidden.

Tellingly, Haworth-Booth's brief comment piece is drawn to subject matter and not photographic technique. He notes how the exhibition "accommodates fascinations with the library in a remarkable house (Bailey); the world of physics (Walker) and black holes (Martins); grey, as understood in Japanese aesthetics (Treacy); and the booming manufacturing economy of China (Braden)".

In what used to be the Impressions caf - and still should be in a gallery that should not forget the need for drinking as well as thinking space - the waiting-room walls are given over to Bailey's photographs of the spines of books from the private library of modernist architect Erno Goldfinger at 2 Willow Road. Bailey brings together art and architecture, while conveying the mind and tastes and life history of Goldfinger in her smartly minimalist chronicle.

Gallery One has been painted battleship grey to complement Treacy's images of stacks of chairs, stairways, discarded wheels and empty bedrooms. In Grey Area, Treacy has not only stripped the world of all colour but life too: there are no people, and no captions, and even the wall socket in the bedroom has no plug in it.

Nuclear particle researcher Walker accompanies each of her humorous pieces with a blackboard of calculations. For anyone who found physics dull - and the calculations impossible to work out - her energetic pictures bring science to everyday life. Witness her reinterpretation of quantum chromo dynamics as the strong interaction of a kissing couple in a park. Suddenly, it all makes sense.

Braden's documentary work, matching the anonymity of mass-produced clothes to its young, lab-rat workforce, is the stuff of weekend magazine supplements, while Martins' Black Holes And Other Inconsistencies look like an X-Files case for Mulder and Scully.

Updated: 09:56 Monday, March 15, 2004