Deutsche Börse 2013 – a shortlist that's short of photographers

The only surprise in the just-announced shortlist for the Deutsche Börse photography prize is the name Chris Killip. He is the only documentary photographer on the shortlist and the only one with a substantial body of work stretching back over several decades. He probably won't win. The other three contenders – Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Mishka Henner and Cristina de Middel – are contemporary artists who use photography as part of their practice.

My money's on Broomberg & Chanarin. The South African-born duo are nominated not for an exhibition but for a book, War Primer 2, which pays homage to Bertolt Brecht's 1955 publication War Primer, in which he matched his poems with newspaper clippings about the second world war. Broomberg & Chanarin attempt something similar regarding the so-called war on terror, using found images from the internet and mobile phones to, the press release says, "combine them to resonate with Brecht's poems". As a critique of contemporary war photography, it's perfectly in keeping with a strong strand of Broomberg & Chanarin's work, though their critique of the Northern Irish Troubles, People in Trouble Laughing Pushed to the Ground, is much wittier and altogether less forced.

I loved Cristina de Middel's self-published series The Afronauts when it appeared in 2011 and still do. Another book rather than an exhibition – a sign of the times? – its conceptual starting point is the short-lived effort by Zambia to send the first African astronauts to Mars. Long consigned to the realm of anecdote and legend, this ambitious project was revisited by De Middel in a photobook that combines myth and reality in constructed colour photographs, drawings and letters. It's a funny little book, but for me it seems too slight a work for the Deutsche Börse shortlist.

Likewise Mishka Henner's exhibition, No Man's Land II, yet another series that reappropriates images from Google Street View (see also Doug Rickard, Michael Wolf and Jon Rafman). Henner used internet forums to identify places where sex workers plied their trade, then located these sites on Google Street View. His appropriated photographs supposedly "pose complex questions about the blurring of boundaries between voyeurism, online information gathering and privacy rights". They also pose complex questions about Henner's own role: the fact that these images, relatively untouched, become the artist's own just by being used in a different context.

Killip's documentary work is esteemed, though he has been overlooked of late by all the major British galleries, including the Photographers' Gallery, which makes it somewhat ironic to see his name on the shortlist. (The closest his big celebratory retrospective came to these shores was Essen, where it was held at the Folkwang Museum last year.) He is the only one on the shortlist who could be said to have created an iconic book, 1988's In Flagrante, as well as a major body of work that has stood the test of time.

Killip is included in the Deutsche Börse shortlist for his series of photographs, What Happened/Great Britain 1970–1990?, which chronicles the decline of working-class industrial communities in the north-east. Does the Deutsche Börse photography prize 2013 shortlist reflect the state of contemporary photography? Probably. Should it be renamed the Deutsche Börse photographic prize? Yes.