Who or what is Jean-Marc Bustamante? This, surely, is the question we are supposed to ask of this artist of the affectless, who has skated in his three-decade-long career across the genres – first photography, then Minimalist sculpture, then a merger of the two, and for the last few years these shockingly vivid “paintings” (I use the scare quotes intentionally) on Plexiglass.

It’s been 17 years since apartheid came to an end in South Africa, and the transition to democracy has not been an easy one, for while political systems may change, social attitudes may prove yet more difficult to shift. The Victoria and Albert Museum brings together 17 South African photographers whose work responds to the cultural and social changes their country has undergone. This major survey looks at photography from the last decade: exploring issues of identity across race, gender, class and politics, it provides a vivid snapshot of what it means to be a South African today.

You hardly expect to turn out for an exhibition of cutting-edge photography because of what the images are of. You go for the style, for the technique, for what’s being said about the medium and the, er, beauty. Yet at least one of the nominees for this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Prize – an event that seems to be emerging as a kind of Turner Prize for photography – belongs to the old, subject-oriented approach to the lens. A member of the legendary Magnum agency, American Jim Goldberg is a photojournalist, who travels the world looking for bad stuff – torture, refugees, human trafficking. And if he doesn’t find enough of it he doesn’t eat.

Photography is linked closely with memory. Photographs help us recall family, friends, holidays, and it can attest to an event. But one could argue that it actually serves a purpose of forgetting. As we are immersed in a digital age, the photograph becomes a series of binary numbers which doesn’t exist until it is written or printed, and which can be erased as easily as it is captured. Photographs are now as close to human recall as technology will allow. Daniel Linehan's Montage for Three last night was a perfomance piece which tried to address that.

The sea: the depths from which all life emerged, and a force of destruction. Anselm Kiefer contemplates its sublime beauty and terror in a new exhibition of 24 panoramic photographs, ranged three-deep on two facing walls. Each grey and grainy seascape has been smeared and splattered with white paint and transformed by “electrolysis”, a process which isn’t further explained in the press release but which sounds suitably and impressively dramatic.

What ever happened to Ida Kar? If the question is not quite on the level of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, perhaps the answer is more interesting, if less melodramatic. Ida Kar - born Ida Karamian in Russia of Armenian parents, resident of Cairo, Alexandria, Paris and Soho, the first photographer to be given a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in its heyday under that curator of genius Bryan Robertson – is now, all too often, known as “Ida Who?” even by those who should know better. So, What Did Happen to Ida Kar?

“I’ve never been intimidated by them. I don't suffer from thinking, that person is a star. They’ve got their job. I’ve got mine. If they’re pleasant so much the better.” Angela Allen’s lifetime in film has found her working closely with some of the most iconic figures in 20th-century entertainment, from matinee idols to gnarled silverscreen pros. Of the 75 pictures on which she was script supervisor, this selection of photographs from her personal album gives some sense of her long and distinguished contribution to cinema, including the occasional bit of body double work when no other appropriate female was around.

Charlotte MacMillan took photographs of the first new full-length ballet at The Royal Ballet for 16 years, Christopher Wheeldon's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which premiered last night at the Royal Opera House. Designs are by Bob Crowley, lighting by Natasha Katz, projection design by Jon Driscoll and Gemma Carrington. Music by Joby Talbot, scenario by Nicholas Wright. See theartsdesk's review of last night's world premiere.

If you’ve seen pictures of the Ballets Russes, then you’ve seen Hoppé photographs. But then, if you’ve seen any society pictures from the 1920s and 1930s, then you’ve seen Hoppé. And famous writers. In fact, for portrait photography in Britain between the World Wars, you can pretty well bet the photo is Hoppé’s. But what's so good about this new exhibition is that it shows a side to Hoppé that is much less well-known - the street-view. And these photographs are thrilling, in form as well as content.

We usually leave art award controversies to the Turner Prize at Tate Britain. So it’s a surprise to hear that the National Portrait Gallery has stepped up to the plate with their annual Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize. And if you’ve already seen the exhibition, we’re not talking about any eyebrows that might have been raised over second prize-winner Panayiotis Lamprou’s rather revealing portrait of his young wife.