As is usually the case, the nominees for the first Rudin Prize for Emerging Photographers at the Norton Museum of Art are divided between artists who focus on their subjects, and artists who focus on themselves.

And as always, if you’re going to be among the latter, you’d better be really good.

Each of the photographers was nominated by a panel consisting of highly respected international talents - the artists John Baldessari, Yinka Shonibare, Graciela Iturbide, Susan Meiselas and Michal Rovner. The sole criteria was that the individual could never have had a museum show. “They could be 22 years old or 82 years old,” says Norton Curator of Photography Tim Wride, who also helped choose the finalists.

With a $20,000 prize and the promise of a future solo exhibition at the Norton, the photographers reacted to their selection with understandable excitement. “It was everybody’s Ed McMahon moment,” says Wride. “My job was to be the best possible advocate for the greatest possible show contained by their work.”

A selection of images from the five nominees is now on display at the Norton. The result is a clash involving varying degrees of maturity. Some of the photographers are clearly high-end talents in command of their gift; others are still in the process of being and becoming.

Eunice Adorno, from Mexico City, takes as her subject the Mennonite women of Northern Mexico (I didn’t know there were any.) Some of these photographs recall Diane Arbus - a shot of two chubby sisters sitting on a loud floral couch staring at the camera - but as with Arbus, there’s more going on here than a steely examination of The Other.

Adorno’s images have a cinematic sense of flow. Her theme is strong enough, and the faces are varied enough, to give a cumulatively luminous quality to the fairly hackneyed concept of a homogeneous community that isn’t really that homogeneous. Not that it’s any ultimate criteria, but Adorno also grades her color work very finely.

Mauro D’Agati lives in Palermo, and his subject is a crime family in Naples, Italy. The shots are largely environmental; nothing tells you it’s a crime family other than a wall-sized grouping of actual Neapolitan mug shots. (For what it’s worth, Naples doesn’t look like it offers much in the search for ill-gotten swag.)

Bjorn Veno lives in Rochester, Kent in England. His work features him in various guises - an aboriginal king, a brawny outdoorsman lugging a dead salmon, a Thor Heyerdahl-style adventurer on a crude raft who steers with more than his rudder. The reference point here are the elaborately styled sex-role shots of Cindy Sherman, but with the sex flipped.

Analia Saban is from Los Angeles, and her work is as much about the materials and what she subjects them to as it is about what’s being photographed. “Seascape With Blue Tape” shows a coarsely developed black and white sea image with a piece of painter’s tape hanging off it, said tape having removed the emulsion from the image. Almost all of Saban’s images display a similar interest in multiple textures.

Gabriela Nin Solis is from Mexico City and her work circles around a Mexico City neighborhood in danger of being displaced by urban renewal. The shots are arresting, but there’s something missing - perhaps it’s one dominant image. As it is, it’s a mosaic that doesn’t quite compose into a larger picture.

The winner of the prize will be announced in December, and chosen by Norton curators Charles Stainback, Tim Wride, art collector and philanthropist Beth DeWoody, and the Norton’s 14 person Photo Committee. There are a couple of other similar awards for emerging talents - the McKnight Fellowship, the Stoumen Award - but the Rudin Award, named after Beth Rudin DeWoody’s father, casts a wide net over the western world’s geographies, not to mention its artistic intents.

And it marks another stage in the development of the Norton as a showcase for fresh talents, not just the great artists of the past.