MADRID.- PHotoEspaña awards nine prizes every edition which recognise the Festival’s best exhibitions, the year’s most outstanding publications and the professional path of Spanish and international photographers, both well-known and emerging. With these awards the festival recognizes the important function that the publishing industry takes as a way for the diffusion of photography.
The jury formed by Pep Carrió, graphic designer; Frits Gierstberg, director of exhibitions in Netherlands Museum of Rotterdam; and Kasahara Michiko, curator of Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography have recognized as the Best Photography Books of the Year in the international category: Destroy this Memory by Richard Misrach, published by Aperture Foundation.
Richard Misrach's Destroy This Memory is an affecting reminder of the physical and psychological impact of Hurricane Katrina. Rather than simply surveying the damage, Misrach—who has photographed the region regularly since the 1970s, most notably for his ongoing Cancer Alley project—found himself drawn to the hurricane-inspired graffiti: messages scrawled in spray paint, crayons, chalk, or whatever materials happened to be on hand. At turns threatening, desperate, clinical, and even darkly humorous, the phrases he captured—the only text that appears in the book—offer unique and revealing human perspectives on the devastation and shock left in the wake of this disaster. Destroy This Memory presents previously unpublished and starkly compelling material, all of which Misrach shot with his 4 MP pocket camera. Created between October and December 2005, this haunting series of images serves as a potent, unalloyed document of the raw experiences of those left to fend for themselves in the aftermath of Katrina.
Artist's royalties for this project are being donated to the Make It Right Foundation, which is currently rebuilding the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.
The Best Photography Book of the Year in national category has been awarded to Europa, by Bernard Plossu; co-published by Santander 2016 Foundation in collaboration with La Fábrica Editorial. Santander 2016 Foundation - which is in charge of the campaign for Santander to be named European Capital of Culture for 2016 -invited Bernard Plossu, the French master photographer (Vietnam, 1945), to create a special collection drawn from his immense archive of photographs taken throughout the Old Continent over the last four decades. The glorious fruit of this painstaking process is this ambitious new book, entitled Europa, jointly published by the Santander 2016 Foundation and La Fábrica Editorial, which offers lucid and unexpected insights into often-unnoticed corners of Europe as it really is, through its 248 black-and-white photographs.
Europa brings together poetic images in which the author - ever a tireless traveller - shares with us his lived experiences, snapshots of aspects of life, where space, time and memory are compressed into a single moment. These images of daily existence, shot from a bus or a train, taken while wandering through the streets of countries such as Spain, France, Portugal, Italy, Germany and Belgium, reflect the very particular way of understanding the world of this maestro, who has been awarded France's Grand Prix National de la Photographie, and whose work has been celebrated in major retrospectives at the Pompidou Centre and Valencia's IVAM.
The book Ukraina Pasport, by Federico Clavarino, co- published by Fiestas Ediciones and Kursala of Cádiz University has received a special mention in this category.
The Prize to the prominent Publishing house of the year has been given to Nobody (United Kingdom) in recognition by the publications B Side, by Stephen Gill and Coming Up For Air, by Stephen Gill.
