"Please Ring Bell" at PCNW a collection of masterful work

I like to think I'm pretty handy with a camera. (You should see the photos I took the other day of my kids at the International Fountain — the light, the arcs of water, the happy faces — genius!) But a trip to an exhibition like "Please Ring Bell" at the Photographic Center Northwest puts things in perspective. "Please Ring Bell" is a juried show, the 13th of the center's annual photographic competitions, and the photographs on display clearly demonstrate technical and narrative mastery. There are gripping black-and-white shots with a straight, documentary feel and more abstract, dreamy works that have been expertly manipulated in various ways. These folks know what they're doing.

This year's juror, Rod Slemmons, former curator of prints and photographs at the Seattle Art Museum and current director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago, selected 25 photographers whose entries represent a "larger, cohesive body of work." Three photographs by each artist are displayed, a curatorial choice that is key to the show's success. The miniseries give a sense of substance and narrative to each artist's work and keep the eye and mind from bouncing around too much — always a danger in large juried shows.

Across the board, these are excellent photographs and the artists certainly deserve the prize money ($500, $750 and $1,000 prizes, thanks to Getty Images, which perhaps could foot even more next year) but quibbling with the top awards is part of the fun of visiting a juried show. If you like a photograph and find that the juror agrees with you — take it as instant validation of your excellent judgment. Dislike a photograph that the juror has given an award to? Instant validation of your discerning taste. Slemmons' choice for best in show, Sally Ketcham's "Endgames" photographs, left me a bit flat, although perhaps their Robert Rauschenberg painterly-print-collage feel serves as an homage after Rauschenberg's recent death.

I would have moved up second-place winner Victoria Veenstra to the top spot. She creates tabletop tableaus that are weird and wonderful to look at. Setting up pop-culture figurines and other objects on the tables of restaurants, Veenstra uses a pinhole camera to play with scale, focus and exposure to create mysterious, moody worlds inhabited by mismatched action figures (be sure to look for Seattle's own Nancy Pearl as the shushing librarian doll).

Marie Sauvaitre's photographs pack some of the hardest visual and emotional punches. At first Sauvaitre's goals seem mostly formal; she captures striking, if bleak, mazelike arrangements of walls, windows, doors from an elevated vantage point, allowing us to survey the visually compelling constructions in their stark settings. But the titles of the photographs — such as " 'Chicago' Urban Warfare Training Ground, Israel" — add frightening real-world implications to the scene. Other artists have a remarkable ability to instantly involve us in the personal lives of people we've never met. Evan Baden uses vivid, saturated color and large-scale, tightly focused compositions to engage us with his subjects: tweens and teens who are absolutely absorbed in their personal electronic devices. The glowing light from a computer, a handheld electronic game and an iPhone illuminate the glassy eyes and expressionless faces of these young people. We observe them in their homey surroundings as they communicate with unseen others in a virtual space.

Beverly Conley, in photographs like "Woman Plucking a Chicken," presents simple, everyday moments and scenes that speak volumes about life in Arkansas' Ozark Mountains. Conley's direct approach and gentle use of the contrasts of black-and-white photography do not ask us to applaud or pity her subjects: poor people in ramshackle surroundings. Instead, we are simply invited to observe and contemplate the rich everyday-ness of these scenes.

The invitation to enter other spaces and communicate with others is also suggested by the title of the exhibition, "Please Ring Bell," a title which also plays with the language of entering into the photographic competition and with the idea of service. These highly skilled photographers do provide a service — an opportunity to see fragments of real life as captured by artists or to see new, surreal images created through technical feats.