LONDON.- The Kraszna-Krausz Foundation has announced the winners of the 35th edition of the Photography and Moving Image Book Awards. The annual Awards celebrate outstanding and original publications that will have a lasting impact on their field. In lieu of a physical awards ceremony, the 2020 winning titles will be showcased in a live streamed in-conversation event in partnership with The Photographers’ Gallery on 30th September 2020.

Each winner will receive £5,000 for the Award.

LaToya Ruby Frazier has been awarded the Photography Book Award for her eponymous book LaToya Ruby Frazier (Mousse Publishing & Mudam Luxembourg).
Published to accompany her exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg in 2019, LaToya Ruby Frazier includes works from three of Frazier’s major photographic series: The Notion of Family (2001–14), On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford (2017) and And From the Coaltips a Tree Will Rise (2016–17) . With its commentary on poverty, racial discrimination, post-industrial decline and its human costs, the book leaves a lasting historical legacy and forms a pertinent contemporary commentary about the American condition. The almost magazine-like production values of the book add to this sense of historical ‘first draft’.




"In my photographs, I make social commentary about urgent issues I see in the communities or places I’m in. I use them as a platform to advocate for social justice and as a means to create visibility for people who are on the margins, who are deemed “unworthy”: the poor, the elderly, the working class, and anyone who doesn’t have a voice. I create depictions of their humanity that call for equity. That is what is dear to my practice and my position as an artist" — LaToya Ruby Frazier

Hannah Frank has been awarded the Moving Image Book Award for Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons (University of California Press)
In this beautifully written and posthumously published Ph.D. thesis, Frank applies a unique methodology – a frame by frame look at the laborious process behind pre digital cartoon-making in the Golden Age of animation (1920–1960). Demonstrating how central photography was to “an art formed on the assembly line”, the book reveals moments of unexpected beauty and hidden history within the animated image. It's often thought that every fictional film is a documentary of its own making; Frank argues that the same goes for animation.

“This is an exceptional book: original, poignant, hugely significant and full of verve, with writing that is wry, neat and seductive. Hannah Frank’s obsessive focus on the single cell in animation calls on us to change our way of perceiving culture. Her intellectual range is astonishing: Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, André Bazin, Walter Benjamin, Sergei Eisenstein – all are invoked to get us to think about what animation is, and to forcibly remind us of the invisible factory labour that manufactured the polished, animated commodity. Hannah Frank has given us a perfectly crystalised intellectual project.” – Dr Andrew Moor, Judge, Moving Image Book Award

Sir Brian Pomeroy CBE, Chair of the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation said: “We had over 200 high calibre entries for the 2020 edition of the Awards, each engaging with some of the most important issues of our day, such as race, justice and identity or shedding new light on bygone eras of film and photography. We are honoured to award and acknowledge LaToya Ruby Frazier and Hannah Frank for their rigorous and original books which will no doubt serve as touch points for many years to come.”

Brett Rogers OBE, Director of The Photographers’ Gallery said: “We are delighted to be hosting the winners event for the 35th anniversary of the Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards. This year’s winners demonstrate the enduring influence of photography and moving image in challenging the ways we perceive culture and the pertinent issues facing us today, and – importantly - recognising the important contribution that photobooks play in sustaining and developing the medium. We look forward to supporting both of the winning titles not least in a special online event which allows a wide audience to engage with the ideas and motivations behind them.”