KKF Book Awards 2020 - Watch the film

Discover the work of the 2020 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards Winners in this recording of a special live-streamed event which took place on Wednesday 30 September 2020.

In conversation: LaToya Ruby Frazier with Renée Mussai & Daniel Morgan with Karen Redrobe

Presented in collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery, London, this extended live-streamed event began with a rare chance to hear from Chicago-based artist LaToya Ruby Frazier, whose eponymous book has won this year’s KKF Photography Book Award. She was in conversation with curator Renée Mussai. This was followed by an exploration of the work of Hannah Frank with Daniel Morgan.  Morgan is the editor of Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons by Hannah Frank, which is the recipient of the KKF Moving Image Book Award 2020. He was joined by art historian, Karen Redrobe. Each discussion was followed by audience Q&As. 

LaToya Ruby Frazier is a visual artist known for collaborative storytelling with the people who appear in her photographs, videos, texts and performances. Her use of the photograph as a platform for social justice and visual representation for working class families is rooted in her commitment to expose the violation of basic human rights and promote environmental justice, access to healthcare, education and employment and migration and immigration equity. Her photographs often become a source of empowerment that lead to creative solutions. LaToya Ruby Frazier (Mousse Publishing & Mudam Luxembourg) includes works from three of Frazier’s major photographic series and explores racial discrimination, poverty, post-industrial decline and its human costs. Frazier will soon publish two new books: LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze, Renaissance Society, University Chicago Press, being released 2020, and Gordon Parks/Steidl Publications Book prize for Flint Is Family In Three Acts, to be published in 2021. Frazier is an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a 2015 MacArthur “Genius Grant Fellow” and is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York City and Brussels.

Hannah Frank (1984-2017) taught film studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her posthumously published Ph.D thesis Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons (University of California Press) shows how central photography was to the process of cartoon-making in the Golden Age of animation (1920-60). Frank takes a frame by frame look at the laborious process of “an art formed on the assembly line”, revealing moments of unexpected beauty and hidden history within the image.

Renée Mussai is Senior Curator and Head of Curatorial & Collections at Autograph, London. Her recent exhibitions include Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness (2017 – touring); Lina Iris Viktor’s Some Are Born To Endless Night — Dark Matter (2019–21) and Phoebe Boswell’s The Space Between Things (2018/19). Research-led and collaborative curatorial initiatives include Black Chronicles (2014 – present) and Women’s Mobile Museum (2018, with Muholi and the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center). Mussai is also Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg; Associate Lecturer at University of the Arts London; and regular guest curator and former fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University as well as part-time PhD candidate in art history at University College London. Working between the contemporary and historical, she writes and lectures internationally on photography, lens-based visual culture and curatorial activism. Her publications include artist monographs Lina Iris Viktor: Some Are Born To Endless Night — Dark Matter (2019/20) and James Barnor: Ever Young (2015). She has recently guest co-edited a volume of Critical Arts (2020) and is currently researching the forthcoming anthology Black Chronicles (2021). She lives and works in London, UK.

Daniel Morgan is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is author of Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (2013) and The Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera (2021), as well as a number of articles on topics in film theory and aesthetics, non-fiction film, animation and experimental cinema.

Karen Redrobe is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Modern Media, Director of the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the Board of Directors for Scribe Video Center, a Philadelphia media center for social change founded in 1982 by Louis Massiah. She is the author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism (Duke UP, 2003); Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (Duke UP, 2010), and is now working on a new book, Undead: Animation and the Contemporary Art of War. She has co-edited three volumes: Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography with Jean Ma (Duke UP, September 2008) and On Writing With Photography (Minnesota UP, 2013) with Liliane Weissberg, and Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures with Jeff Scheible (Minnesota UP, March 2021); and she is the editor of Animating Film Theory (Duke UP, 2014).