Tower blocks and tomes dominate the Rencontres d'Arles

The opening week of the Rencontres d'Arles photography festival 2011 culminated on Saturday night with the announcement that this year's Discovery award had gone to the young South African photographer, Mikhael Subotzky, and the British artist, Patrick Waterhouse, for their collaboration Ponte City. The three-year project resulted in an impressive series of giant tableaux, made up of hundreds of contact sheets, presented in towering light boxes.

Their subject was the 54-storey cylindrical building, Ponte City, in Johannesburg – the tallest residential tower block in Africa. The artists' lightbox panels are divided into three themes: doors, windows and TVs. Taken together, they present a montage of life in a building that, when it was built in the mid-70s, attracted the city's affluent white middle classes. By the 90s, escalating gang violence in the local neighbourhood had turned it into a high-rise ghetto. Subotzky's photographs look outwards – across the sprawling city below – and inwards – to the domestic interiors of its residents. The installation resembles a mini tower block made up of myriad photographs. As metaphors go it is simple but effective. I was more taken, though, with the work of another South African photographer, Jo Ractliffe, whose stark but evocative images of postwar Angolan landscapes are subtle and suggestive.

The best photobook of 2011, voted for by the nominators of the Discovery prize, went unsurprisingly to Taryn Simon for A Living Man Declared Dead, the big, heavy – and, at around £80, prohibitively expensive – catalogue to her Tate Modern show of the same name. (Simon won last year's Discovery award, though she hardly needed discovering by that stage.) I would have opted for Alec Soth's catalogue from his Walker Arts Centre retrospective, From Here to There, which, I have it on good authority, was pipped by one vote.

The historical book prize went to Works by Lewis Baltz, another heart-stoppingly expensive boxset that Steidl are selling for a cool £600, but a brilliant retrospective nonetheless from one of the pioneers of the New Topographics style. What chance, though, do smaller publishing houses and self-published books have against the likes of these expensive heavyweights aimed at the high-end book collecting market? The organisers should celebrate the shortlist in each category as well as simply announcing the winners. And perhaps the nominees should come clean about which book they voted for and why? That might make things a lot more interesting … and transparent.