2020 Book Awards
The winners of the 2020 Photography and Moving Image Book Awards have been announced
LaToya Ruby Frazier wins the Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award and Hannah Frank is celebrated posthumously with the Moving Image Book Award.
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 digital event in partnership with The Photographers’ Gallery on the 30th September. LaToya Ruby Frazier will be in conversation with curator Renée Mussai and Daniel Morgan will discuss Hannah Frank’s work with academic and historian Karen Redrobe.
Click here to discover the work of the 2020 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards Winners in this recording of the special live-streamed event which took place on Wednesday 30 September 2020.
LaToya Ruby Frazier has been awarded the Photography Book Award for her eponymous book LaToya Ruby Frazier (Mousse Publishing & Mudam Luxembourg).
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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
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. 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.
LaToya Ruby Frazier by LaToya Ruby Frazier, published by Mousse Publishing and Mudam Luxembourg.
Frazier’s images are accompanied by an essay by the contemporary art historian Elvan Zabunyan and by an extensive interview with the artist conducted by Mudam curator, Christophe Gallois and Claire Tenu, a photographer and teacher.
Hannah Frank has been awarded the Moving Image Book Award for Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons (University of California Press).
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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 the pre-digital processes of cartoon-making. Elucidating hitherto unseen aspects of the animated image, she enriches our understanding of the Golden Age of animation (1920–1960), providing an original account of an art formed on the assembly line. 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 cel 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 2020
Hannah Frank (1984–2017) was Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work has been published in Critical Quarterly and Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and she contributed a chapter to A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood. She is the author of Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons (University of California Press).
Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons, published by University of California Press. Edited by Daniel Morgan (University of Chicago). Foreword by Tom Gunning.
“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.“
Chair of the Kraszna Krausz Foundation
The books longlisted 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.
The 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.
In lieu of an Awards Ceremony which usually takes place during Photo London, the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation has teamed up with The Photographers’ Gallery. A free live stream event featuring conversations about the two winning titles will be hosted by the Gallery on Wednesday 30th September.
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.
Director of The Photographers’ Gallery
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.
2020 Photography Book Award Shortlist
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.
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 Photography Book Award Longlist
The 2020 Photography Book Award was judged by:
Edwards is currently Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor at the V&A Research Institute, London and Professor Emerita of Photographic History at De Montfort University, Leicester. Edwards is an Honorary Professor in the Department of Anthropology University College London and a Curator Emerita and Research Affiliate at ISCA, University of Oxford.
Fraser’s work is held in major establishments across the world including the Tate, The British Council, V&A, Foundation A Stichting, Brussels, Mast Foundation, Bologna, Siemens Collection, Munich, Yale Centre for British Art, and Private Collections Worldwide. In 2002, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, staged a 20 year survey exhibition of Fraser’s work. From January to May 2013, Tate St Ives held a retrospective of Fraser’s career, the first ever Tate Retrospective given to a living British Photographer working in colour.
At Photoworks Mavlian curated Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Zone Grise / The Land In between for the MEP – Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (2019) and A New Europe, Brighton Photo Biennial (2018). From 2011-2018 she was Assistant Curator, Photography and International Art at Tate Modern, London.
2020 Moving Image Book Award Shortlist
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.
Duke University Press has made the entire collection of essays co-edited by Field and Gordon available via a free and open access platform. Click here to read the book.
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 Moving Image Book Award Longlist
The 2020 Moving Image Book Award was judged by:
Hoyes advocates for equity and access in the industry. She has a background in academic research, having completed a BA in Film and Literature at the University of Warwick and an MA in the History of Film and Visual Media at Birkbeck, University of London. She has previously taught undergraduates in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex.
Macnab’s books include ‘Stairways to Heaven: Rebuilding the British Film Industry’ (2018), ‘Ingmar Bergman: The Life and Films of the Last Great European Director’, ‘Delivering Dreams: A Century of British Film Distribution’, ‘The Making of Taxi Driver’, ‘Searching for Stars: Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema’, ‘Screen Epiphanies’ and ‘J Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry’.
Moor’s monograph, Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces was first published by I.B. Tauris in 2005. He has taught across a wide range of cinema studies, and published on various aspects of British cinema and LGBTQ cinema. Andrew is the elected Chair of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies.