Format Festival, Derby, officially closes on 5th April but much of the work is on show for a week or two longer - see www.formatfestival.com for details.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize runs till 12th April at Photographers’ Gallery, London.

Something good is happening in Derby. A triumvirate of council, galleries and university is working very effectively to build the Format festival; its third edition, launched on 6th March, is bigger and better than ever. The new (and notably welcoming) Quad arts centre forms the hub for Format; with its cinema and gallery it suggests the appropriate theme for Format 2009 - 'Photocinema'.

Why a theme, you might ask? Many of us are just happy to see a concentration of great work and events, but now it seems every festival has to have a motif, an angle, or at least a guest organiser or curator. There's two ways of looking at this. If you're a cynic, you might suggest that the tiny globetrotting elite that is the international arts establishment is now so sophisticated that it won’t cross the road to see an unthemed event. Sometimes this can backfire when too much work misses the mark, and it's not uncommon to visit certain festivals and not even notice there was a theme.

The more positive view is that a theme encourages the artists, photographers and organisers to work a bit harder, and if the mix is right, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Format is a good example of this working. The idea of Photocinema is broad and slippery, and it's allowed the festival’s curator Louise Clements to choose a mixture of great work that connects to cinema in some way alongside some pleasing curiosities that might not otherwise have surfaced.

The central exhibition housed in Quad’s main gallery is a treat, splendidly lit and hung. Gregory Crewdson’s luscious prints have never looked better; low on the wall, you’re pitched right into the mysterious worlds that he creates. Look around and you realise the concentration of photography stars in one room - Hannah Starkey, William Eggleston, Cindy Sherman compete for your attention. Simon Roberts' icy images of Russia are epic and atmospheric. He is also an exemplary model to study for emerging photographers; hard-working and intelligent, in a relatively short career he's produced work with an appeal for the computer games generation as much as the arts world. Interesting to note a background in human geography and journalism that must have contributed to the logic and rhetoric behind his work. Two of the most impressive series come from Chinese photographers Zhang Xiao, whose work, setting out to show how ancient customs have survived in modern China, has mystery, joy and humanity worthy of Cristina Garcia Rodero, and Muge, showing exquisite and moving portraits from his home town of Chongqing. Zhang Xiao and Muge have talked about the hardships of becoming a photographer in China - sharing a room, sleeping with no mattress and eating cheap noodles for a year to be able to afford film. That’s the kind of obsession that festival patron Martin Parr, talking at the opening conference about the requirements for success in photography, might approve of.

There’s lots more around the town and online, with new ways of working integrated into the festival. Five international collectives make an interesting contribution around the role of the collective in generating ideas and supporting new work. The online Mob Format collects public contributions around the Photocinema theme through a cool Flickr interface. Work from Magnum photographers is shown through projections with sound, building on the success of Magnum in Motion. For the more traditionally inclined Derby’s Museum and Art Gallery shows Wim 'Life is in colour, but black and white is more realistic' Wenders’ stills from his movies - and while you’re there be sure to see Joseph Wright’s extraordinary Enlightenment paintings.

The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize exhibition for 2009 sees The Photographers' Gallery start to settle into its new building in Ramilles Street, London. Just a bottle's throw from Oxford Street, Europe's busiest shopping street, the building retains the great café, bookshop and print sales areas, while finally uniting its two galleries in one building. Befitting its new location there’s more of an emphasis on buying and selling prints, with a handy display on processes and prices that every selling photographer will find useful. And there’s a helpful three minute video interview with each of the four exhibited photographers. The lighting is bright, the walls a dazzling white - perhaps I was emerging from a Mancunian winter, but I’d have liked them painted down a shade or two.

Paul Graham won the prize this year with “A Shimmer of Possibility”. This is work based on an idea that like all the best ones is very simple: if you show half a dozen images, made in sequence around a single subject, you can communicate so much more - a bit like seeing the contact sheet instead of a single image. It helps of course if you are as good a photographer as Graham, considered the first to unite contemporary colour photography with the classic genre of social documentary. He likens these works to photographic haikus. Interestingly the first edition of the 12-book set connected with the exhibition, which launched at £130 in October 2007, now sells for £850 - an annual increase that might even raise Bernard Madoff’s eyebrow.

The other three photographers’ work is also strong; Tod Papageorge’s “Passing through Eden” is a nostalgic, dream-like view of Central Park, New York, in the late 20th Century. Taryn Simon’s “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” has a particular resonance in this CCTV age. Emily Jacir creates a visual diary around the assassination of the Palestinian translator Wael Zwaiter by Israeli agents in Rome in 1972. It’s great to see photography that unites the poetic with the political.

Review by Paul Herrmann