James Casebere, Anna Gaskell, Jitka Hanzlova, Tim Macmillan and Tracey Moffatt have been shortlisted for The Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize 2000. Work by each of the artists will be on display at The Photographers' Gallery, London, between 11 February - 25 March 2000 and the announcement of the winner of the Prize, increased this year to £15,000, will be made on 2 March 2000 at The Photographers' Gallery, London.

James Casebere (born 1953, Michigan, USA) was nominated for his exhibition Asylum at The Museum of Modem Art, Oxford (24 January - 4 April 1999), Santiago de Compostela, Spain and Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich. Casebere makes and photographs models based on images of existing buildings. His recent photographs are of places of confinement - prisons, hospitals, asylums - all devoid of people. His work is a meditation on loneliness and solitude with a sinister undercurrent of disciplinary guilt and constant surveillance.

Anna Gaskell (born 1969, Des Moines, USA) exhibited her series Hide at White Cube (February 1999) and a new series of work, Override, at The Museum of Modem Art, Oxford (18 April - 27 June1999). Override uses Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland as a starting point and concentrates on Alice's anxiety over controlling her size. Her large format colour photographs use a Baroque compositional technique that pulls the viewer into swirling space in which Alice is continuously distorted. The series explores the mystery, violence and the seductive power of childhood.

Jitka Hanzlova (born 1958, Czech Republic) was nominated for her contribution to the exhibition Near and Elsewhere at The Photographers' Gallery (11 June - 24 July 1999) in which she exhibited her haunting series, Rokytnik In 1990 after the Velvet Revolution, Hanzlova returned to the Czech Republic after many years exile in Germany. The portraits and landscapes of the Rokytnik series document her rediscovery of her suspended childhood memories, the old pathways, signs, sounds and smells."

British artist Tim Macmillan (born 1959, Oregan USA) developed the Time-Slice camera during his days as a painting student in the early 1980s. This camera, which is made up of a film with a lens over each frame, produces a sweeping tracking shot of a movement frozen in time. With this camera he produced the extraordinary work Dead Horse (National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford, 17 September - 14 November 1999), for which he was nominated. The large scale video projection portrays a horse at the moment a bullet enters its brain in a knacker's yard. Its hooves are oft the ground as if the horse is cantering but it is the shock of the bullet entering the body which has produced this effect - the horse is uncannily suspended between life and death.

One of Australia's foremost artists and film-makers, Tracey Moffatt (born 1960, Brisbane, Australia) has been nominated for her work Laudanum at Victoria Miro, London (26 May - 19 June 1999). Laudanum is a series of nineteen photogravures, which have been individually scratched, hand-tinted and aged. The work is staged in a colonial mansion in the Victorian era and enacts the relationship between an Anglo Saxon mistress and her Asian servant girl. The psychosexual tensions between them become emblematic of relations of power and colonialism. Moffatt draws her references from trash TV, documentary and literary sources and her work frequently collapses distinctions between documentary and fiction.

The Jury this year is Michael Mack, independent curator and writer, Olivier Richon, Course Director of Photography, Royal College of Art, Hripsime Visser, Photography Curator, Stedelijk Museum, The Netherlands and Val Williams, Curator, Hasselblad Museum, Sweden.

The Prize was founded by Citibank Private Bank in 1996 to reward the individual judged to have made the most significant contribution to the medium of photography over the last year. The previous winners are Richard Billingham (1997), Andreas Gursky (1998) and Rineke Dijkstra (1999).

This year the number of photographers and artists nominated for the Prize increased significantly to just under 200. The pro portion of artists from outside the UK also grew which is reflected in the international nature of the shortlist.