Louie Palu’s “A Wounded Soldier in a medevac helicopter after a night raid, Zhari District, Kandahar, Afghanistan” is the most immediately arresting image in the entire Sondheim Artscape Prize: 2011 Finalists exhibit for this pair of eyeballs. The Washington, D.C.-based photographer has focused on the war in Afghanistan and the detainees at Guantanamo Bay since 2006, and has spent time embedded with American and Canadian forces in Afghanistan. His documentary photojournalism has already earned awards, and his work has appeared in mainstream publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, TIME, Newsweek, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Economist, and the Wall Street Journal.

The ongoing War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, with its embedded journalists and constant new media coverage and the global reach of non-American media, is one of the most widely photographed military activities in history—out of sight and mind only by Americans who willingly put their heads in the sand. Just the sheer number of eyes following it and the number of outlets where those documenting eyes can post their images overwhelms. Thanks to activist/watchdog organizations, images perhaps censored by the military, governmental intelligence, and mainstream media foibles are also finding their way into mass view. Remember, we weren’t supposed to see those heinous snapshots from Abu Ghraib.

So when an image from this war catches you off guard, you take notice. And “Wounded Soldier” is one such image: A young soldier lies on what appears to be a stretcher, presumably in a helicopter per the title, his face and top of his uniform covered in debris of some sort. The only illumination is an intensely cold blue light coming from somewhere on/inside the helicopter. And the combination of debris and this light makes the young man look, well, sci-fi futuristic. His skin takes on an almost metal sheen, his right eye is closed and part of his face not entirely discernible. He looks almost Terminator man/machine, and because he’s looking directly into the camera, the effect is unnerving.

And it’s an effective reminder that even in a war from which we’ve seen so many images, we haven’t seen everything. That’s a good attitude to adopt when taking in the five finalists for the 2011 Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize. On the surface (save one exception), this batch looks like the most conventionally safe group of finalists in the prize’s six-year existence. The group includes two photographers, Palu and the Washington-based Mark Parascandola, who work in almost a strictly documentary fashion; a sculptor, Rachel Rotenberg, who is almost assuredly going to be fending off adjectives such as “organic” and “earthy”; a filmmaker, Matthew Porterfield, who has already started to establish a name for himself as a rising star of the American art-house. The one who is not like the others is performance artist/filmmaker Stephanie Barber, whose undeniable sense of play camouflages an intellectual rigor and metaphysical uncertainty that infuses her work with emotion.

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