Update: The winners of the 2018 Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Photography Book Award and Moving Image Award were announced on 17th May. Chrystel Lebas has been awarded the Photography Book Award for Field Studies: Walking through Landscapes and Archives (FW: Books) a retracing of the steps of British botanist Sir Edward James Salisbury, creating new images in the same landscapes of his archival collections.
Susan Courtney has been awarded the Moving Image Book Award for Split Screen Nation: Moving Images of the American West and South (Oxford University Press) which follows the oppositional dynamic between the screen West and the screen South. The winners will receive a sum of £5,000 each.
The Kraszna–Krausz Foundation have announced the shortlist for their annual photography and moving image Book Awards. The awards ceremony will be taking place in conjunction with Photo London (17th-20th May). Winners will be revealed at the awards ceremony on Thursday 17th May at The Royal Society of Arts, with a prize of £10,000 split between the two categories.
Best Photography Book Award (Shortlist):
Night Procession by Stephen Gill (Nobody Books)
Gill’s book is a collection of images taken with motion-sensor cameras in the landscape of rural south Sweden, where he moved with his family in 2014. Revealing nocturnal animal activity in the dark forests, Gill’s ethereal master prints are elegantly paired with an essay by Karl Ove Knausgȃrd, who poetically describes the joy of appreciating his known landscape and marvelling at the discovery of its unseen nocturnal life through Gill’s images.
Field Studies: Walking through Landscapes and Archives by Chrystel Lebas (FW: Books)
Lebas has been shortlisted for her intensely researched photographic and moving image project. Produced in a fresh design, reminiscent of a scientific journal, Field Studies is an engaging, multi-layered visual investigation. Her work retraces the steps of British botanist Sir Edward James Salisbury creating new images in the same landscapes of his archival collections.
Museum Bhavan by Dayanita Singh (Steidl)
Shortlisted for its innovative relationship between the photobook and the museum, Singh’s masterly designed photobook object contains nine individual miniature ‘museums’ and creates an entirely new experience of her travelling exhibition
by the same name. Each title contains tactile, accordion- fold pages with small printed tritone images. An additional booklet of interviews between Singh and Gerhard Steidl brings new insights into the artist’s practice and to the creation of the book.
Best Moving Image Book Award (Shortlist):
Split Screen Nation: Moving Images of the American West and South by Susan Courtney (OUP)
This book traces an oppositional dynamic between the screen West and the screen South that was unstable and dramatically shifting in the decades after WWII, and has marked popular ways of imagining the U.S. ever since. Courtney analyses not only Hollywood films and television, but also educational and corporate films, amateur films and military and civil defence films, arguing that in the face of the Cold War and civil rights struggle, opposition between the two screens mediated the nation’s most paradoxical narratives.
Cinema by Design: Art Nouveau, Modernism and Film History by Lucy Fischer (Columbia UP)
In Cinema by Design, Lucy Fischer traces Art Nouveau’s long history in films from various decades and global locales, appreciating the movement’s enduring avant-garde aesthetics and dynamic ideology. Her work explains why an art movement embedded in modernist sensibilities ca flourish in contemporary film through its visions of nature, gender, sexuality and the exotic.
Agnès Varda: Between Film, Photography and Art by Rebecca J. DeRoo. (U of California Press)
Agnès Varda is a prolific film director, photographer and artist whose cinematic career spans more than six decades. Today she is best known as the innovative ‘mother’ of the French New Wave film movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s and for her multimedia exhibitions. Based on interviews with Varda and unparalleled access to her archives, Rebecca DeRoo’s interdisciplinary study constructs new frameworks for understanding one of the most versatile talents in 20th and 21st century culture.
About the awards
Recognised as the UK’s leading prize for books on Photography and the Moving Image, the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation awards celebrate those that have made an original and lasting contribution to their field. From small publishers to well-established, the Foundation provides a platform and space for new voices and perspectives, whilst championing diversity in both photography and the publishing industry.
The judges for this year’s 2018 Photography Book Award are Karen Knorr, Professor of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts, Christiane Monarchi the Founding Editor of the online magazine Photomonitor, and Jonathan Watkins, Director of Ikon Gallery since 1999.
This year’s Moving Image Book Award was judged by Mark Cosgrove, Curator at Watershed, Bristol, Keith Lodwick, Curator of Theatre and Screen Arts at the V&A’s Department of Theatre & Performance and Catherine Wheatley, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London.