LONDON.- The Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards have announced the long and shortlisted titles for the 35th edition of the prize. The books in the running for the 2020 Photography Book Award and Moving Image Book Award address diverse global issues related to race, justice, identity, and the construction of truth, history and memory.

Ranging from illuminating artist monographs and anthologies to in-depth critiques of photography or filmmaking, to photobooks reconstructing hidden stories, and much more, the lists reflect the Foundation’s enduring recognition of rigorous and original books that will likely have a lasting impact on their field.

Professor Elizabeth Edwards, Judge, Photography Book Award comments: “The significant themes that emerged from this year’s submissions clustered around identity, environment and the uses of history and memory. Overall the entries demonstrate the centrality of photography as a major articulation of submerged, contested but vital histories.”

Dr Andrew Moor, Judge, Moving Image Book Award comments: “The longlist contains work that pushes at the boundaries of the cinematic. It is a set of books that aims to reinterpret the past, reflecting how moving images mediate our lives, animate our memories and vitally record our presence.”

In lieu of an Awards Ceremony which usually takes place during Photo London, the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation has teamed up with The Photographers’ Gallery to announce the winners in September. A live stream event hosted by the Gallery will feature conversations about the two winning books.

Sir Brian Pomeroy CBE, Chair of the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation said: “In this, our 35th anniversary year, 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. We are very pleased to be partnering with The Photographers’ Gallery in presenting the awards this year.”

Brett Rogers OBE, Director of The Photographers’ Gallery said: “We are delighted to have this opportunity to partner with the Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards which, over the past 35 years, have established an international reputation for recognising the most significant contribution in photography and moving image within the book making field. From our earliest days, we have 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.”

Winners will receive prize money of £5,000 each. For both categories, the shortlist selected by the judging panel aims 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 also put precedence on each publication’s design, texture, and haptic qualities, aspects that are particularly poignant during this period of digital focus.

The Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards, first established in 1985, are open to all Moving Image and Photography books published in the previous year and available in the UK. Over 200 entries were considered this year.

The shortlisted titles are as follows:

2020 Photography Book Award (Shortlist):

LaToya Ruby Frazier (Mousse Publishing & Mudam Luxembourg)
With its commentary on poverty, racial discrimination, post-industrial decline and its human costs, this work leaves a lasting historical legacy and forms a pertinent contemporary commentary about the American condition. The almost magazine-like production values add to this sense of historical ‘first draft’.

Photography, Truth and Reconciliation by Melissa Miles (Routledge)
Photography has been at the centre of the political, social and cultural processes of truth and reconciliation in response to oppressive regimes and dispossessing histories. Taking case studies from Argentina, Australia, Cambodia, Canada, and South Africa, Miles explores the dynamics through which artists have explored these compelling and difficult histories, raising questions of memory, identity and justice.

The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows by Sophy Rickett (GOST Books)
Rickett’s book is a striking collection of 41 photographic works inspired by the life and work of 19th Century Welsh artist and astronomer Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn. Through photography and text, Rickett charts her journey towards making sense of the sprawling and complex Dillwyn Llewelyn family archive.

2020 Moving Image Book Award (Shortlist):

Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film by Allyson Nadia Field, Marsha Gordon,
eds (Duke University Press)
Through its focus on the ways in which filmmakers developed and audiences encountered ideas about race, identity, politics, and community outside the borders of theatrical cinema, this essential examination of nontheatrical films reevaluates basic assumptions about American film culture and the place of race within it.

Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons by Hannah Frank
(University of California Press)
Frank's beautifully written and posthumously published Ph.D. thesis applies a unique methodology – a frame by frame look at the laborious process behind the pre-digital processes of cartoon-making elucidating hitherto unseen aspects of the animated image – to enrich our understanding of the Golden Age of animation.

This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia by Joan
Neuberger (Cornell University Press)
Neuberger's riveting narrative of filmmaker Eisenstein's unfinished masterpiece presents a groundbreaking new view of artistic production under Stalin’s rule. The book weaves together the ways in which cinematic invention, artistic theory, political critique, and historical and psychological analysis went hand in hand in this famously complex film.

2020 Photography Book Award (Longlist):




● 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)

● LaToya Ruby Frazier (Mousse Publishing / Mudam Luxembourg)

● 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)

● Photography, Truth and Reconciliation by Melissa Miles (Routledge)

● The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows by Sophy Rickett (GOST Books)

● Where We Find Ourselves: The Photographs of Hugh Mangum, 1897–1922 by Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris, eds. (University of North Carolina Press)

2020 Moving Image Book Award (Longlist):

● Artists’ Moving Image in Britain since 1989 by Erika Balsom, Lucy Reynolds & Sarah Perks (eds) (Paul Mellon Centre)

● 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)

● 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)

● This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia by Joan Neuberger (Cornell University Press)

● 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)