Detail from an image from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Library at Duke University. In ‘Where We Find Ourselves: The Photographs of Hugh Mangum, 1897–1922′ by Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris, eds. (University of North Carolina Press)
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
More Than 200 Submissions This Year
The Kraszna-Krausz Foundation was formed in 1985 by the late Hungarian photographer Andor Kraszna-Krausz—the founder in 1938 of the Focal Press, an imprint of Taylor & Francis/Routledge based in media tech books.
Its 2020 Photography Book Award and Moving Image Book Award shortlists have been announced today from London (July 23). Winners are to be named in September, in association with London’s The Photographers’ Gallery near Covent Garden.
The two winners are each to receive a purse of £5,000 (US$6,378).
For both categories, the shortlist selected by a jury is intended to showcase “innovative and coherent bodies of work with a focus on cultural relevance for our current times and in the years to come.” The judges prioritize a publication’s design, texture, and tangible qualities, emphasizing a valuation in this program on print.
This awards program is also interesting for the range of eligible content it embraces, including artist monographs and anthologies, critiques of photography and filmmaking, photo books that create narratives, and more, all based in some element of visual work.
2020 Shortlist: Photography Book Award
‘Aggressive Assimilation’ by Adrian Stimson, 2013. From the shortlisted ‘Photography, Truth and Reconciliation’ by Melissa Miles (Routledge)
- LaToya Ruby Frazier (Mousse Publishing / Mudam Luxembourg)
- Photography, Truth and Reconciliation by Melissa Miles (Routledge)
- The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows by Sophy Rickett (GOST Books)
Also longlisted for this award were:
- The Canary and The Hammer by Lisa Barnard (MACK)
- Women War Photographers: From Lee Miller to Anja Niedringhaus by Anne-Marie Beckmann & Felicity Kom, eds. (Prestel)
- Seeing the Unseen by Harold Edgerton (Steidl co-published with the MIT Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts)
- Signs and Wonders: The Photographs of John Beasley Greene by Corey Keller (Prestel)
- The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion by Antwaun Sargent (Aperture)
- Dr. Paul Wolff & Tritschler: Light and Shadow – Photographs 1920 bis 1950 by Hans-Michael Koetzle (Kehrer Verlag)
- Where We Find Ourselves: The Photographs of Hugh Mangum, 1897–1922 by Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris, eds. (University of North Carolina Press)
2020 Shortlist: Moving Image Book Award
Frames from Olive Oyl’s dance in ‘Blow Me Down’. From ‘Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons’ by Hannah Frank (University of California Press)
- Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film by Allyson Nadia Field, Marsha Gordon, eds (Duke University Press)
- Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons by Hannah Frank (University of California Press)
- This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia by Joan Neuberger (Cornell University Press)
Also longlisted for this award were:
- Artists’ Moving Image in Britain since 1989 by Erika Balsom, Lucy Reynolds & Sarah Perks (eds) (Paul Mellon Centre)
- The Brighton School and the Birth of British Film by Frank Gray (Palgrave Macmillan)
- Film, Music, Memory by Berthold Hoeckner (University of Chicago Press)
- The Lost World of DeMille by John Kobal (University Press of Mississippi)
- I Seem to Live. The New York Diaries. Vol. I 1950-1969 by Jonas Mekas (Spector Books)
- The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics by Sydney Ladensohn Stern (University Press of Mississippi)
- Silent Cinema: A Guide to Study, Research and Curatorship by Paolo Cherchi Usai (Bloomsbury)
Jurors this year are Elizabeth Edwards, a visual and historical anthropologist currently at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s research wing, and Andrew Moor, a reader in cinema history in the English department at Manchester Metropolitan University.
In prepared statements on the shortlist announcements, Brian Pomeroy, who chairs the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation, is quoted, saying, “The submissions have maintained an extremely high standard of image-making and authorship, carrying forward our mission to encourage and celebrate outstanding photo books and books about the moving image.”
And Photographers’ Gallery director Brett Rogers, says, “The Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards have established an international reputation for recognizing the most significant contribution in photography and moving image in the book field.
“From our earliest days, we’ve supported and championed the importance of the photo book for photographers, as well as for photographic culture more widely, and regard its many brilliant and innovative variations of form as essential to the medium.”
Established in 1985, these awards are open to submission of moving-image and photography books published in the previous year and available in the United Kingdom. More than 200 entries were put forward this year.
‘Swimming Pool at Wiesbaden’ (1934). From ‘Dr. Paul Wolff & Tritschler: Light and Shadow – Photographs 1920 bis 1950’ by Hans-Michael Koetzle (Kehrer Verlag)
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