2024 Book Awards

Proujansky reconstructs her parents’ radical past, and reckons with what to keep and what to let go. Photographs of their propaganda archive, surveillance records, family photographs and current lives depict their activism, and subsequent turn towards family life. Proujansky invites the viewer to join an intimate observation of the collision between the political and the familial.

“Proujansky’s book – which explores her parents’ participation in left-wing organisations in 1970s America – combines archival images with interviews and family photographs. This is a smart, engaging and eye-opening look at what happens when the life of a single individual collides with the machinery of state paranoia.”
Eugénie Shinkle

Bringing together Ross’s large-format photographs, sculptures, conceptual works, and selected films, together with illuminating texts by Ross and a host of writers, this ambitious publication presents a potent visual chronicle of the American South and its landscape that is both mysterious and quotidian, a historical document and a radical imagining of the future.

“Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body is a book on how photography sees and explains the world. It is a headlong dive into both the everyday and the extraordinary of the American South…Each of the five chapters of image, text, stills, and reflections by other contributors is an exercise in unravelling perceptions.”
Mariama Attah

This revolutionary history brings to light how new colour technologies informed ideas about British national identity during a period of profound social change, when the challenges of industrialisation, decolonisation of the Empire and evolving attitudes to race and gender reshaped the nation.

“The Rainbow’s Gravity reminds its readers that technological innovations, aesthetic values, and in fact, the vibrancy and brilliance of life in the history of British art and cinema have been indebted to its networks of colonial trades. In this book, Kirsty Sinclair Dootson unveils the colonial power asymmetry, material exploitation, ecological destruction, and processes of cultural desubjectivization that have lied underneath the creation, production, and consumption of colours.”
Dr Victor Fan

Challenging established views and assumptions about traditions and practices of filmmaking in the African diaspora, this three-volume set offers readers a researched critique on Black film.

“It is impossible to overstate the value of this ambitious project to the study and understanding of African cinema. The vastness of the subject is rewarded with, and reflected in, this expansive three volume collection of essays and case studies. Weaving together the contributions of film makers and workers alongside film scholars allows for a multiplicity of experiences and voices to coalesce to purposeful decolonising intent. The sheer range of material included is remarkable and often moving.”
Sandra Hebron

“An impeccably researched publication that aligns the life story of Nazi scientist turned American citizen Wernher Von Braun, with the equally conflicted history of space exploration. I loved the way that Depravity’s Rainbow seamlessly aligns formal and aesthetic decisions with a complex historical narrative. The cyanotype images in the book, for instance, are chemically adjacent to the hydrogen cyanide gas used in WWII concentration camps.”
Eugénie Shinkle

“A story of family ties, inescapable connection, and the vulnerability and persistence of these relationships. The story takes the form of two books physically threaded together through Cortez’s close experiences of miscarriage and death. Through Angel and Miguel the missing protagonists are given voice through personal recollection, medical records, and family photos.” Mariama Attah

“Pathe’O is a joy of a historical text, weaving together fashion, national identity, and personal perspectives of ambition and vision. Here, photography has been used to record and resurrect stories of fashion designer Pathe’O’s creativity which otherwise could have remained out of view for most.”
Mariama Attah

“Better in the Dark than His Rider by Francesco Merlini is a creative meditation on the sense of sight drawn together from seemingly unrelated images from the artist’s extended archive. There is a visual sumptuousness to this publication which is enhanced by an approach to the sequencing and design, guided by a sensitive, original reading of colour. This is an expertly achieved photobook, conceptually and aesthetically.”
Anthony Luvera

“Race, beauty, consumption, globalisation, identity, and inclusion are some of the themes that Deborah Roberts palpably threads together in her powerful and distinctive collage works. Twenty Years of Art/Work is a beautifully realised survey publication of two decades of work by Roberts that traces the artist’s commitment to disassembling the cultural violence perpetuated against Black children and the politics of representation that continues to shape the contemporary Black experience at large.”
Anthony Luvera

“Glad Tidings of Benevolence captures not just the chaos of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq itself, but the torrent of conflicting narratives that accompanied it, the ongoing political instability that it left in its wake, and the limits of documentary photography to report objectively on a war that, for most of those living in Iraq, is far from over.”
Eugénie Shinkle

“Maciejka Art’s Hoja Santa is a vivid depiction of a community of women and the artist’s engagement with them as she conjures together themes of traditional medicine, spirituality, healing, and societal expectations of women. There is a tangible sense of the dynamism of femininity that shines through in the design, sequencing, and physical manifestation of this publication, which engages the reader and reflects the multi-layered approach Art took in the creation of the mixed media project it showcases.”
Anthony Luvera

“A rigorous, generative, deeply subversive reorientation of typical ways of thinking about cinema that not only opens up endless new avenues of engagement with the archive but also reveals potent possibilities for contemporary women practitioners.”
Kieron Corless

“Ester M. Bergsmark’s cinematic works have been celebrated in the world film festival circuits. voice under is therefore an exciting addition to her effort to foster dialogues on trans* as creative and critical processes that actively produce aesthetics, microperceptual shimmers, as well as intersubjectivities and agencies.”
Dr Victor Fan

“Through a combination of meticulous research and clarity of analysis, the author offers a persuasive re-evaluation of behaviourist animal experiment films of the 1930s and 1940s, and their lasting impact on American cultural formations. Aside from the fascinatingly original subject matter, the production of the book is noteworthy: the inclusion of QR codes enabling the reader to watch a selection of films referred to, added to the enjoyment and immediacy of reading, and a free Open Access copy is also available.”
Sandra Hebron

“This first comprehensive exploration of the representation of Black urban youth in British film and television reminds us of the validity – necessity even – of the study of popular cultural forms. The author’s skill lies in…applying rigorous intellectual investigation to the socio-political landscape in which representations of Black Britishness have been created, circulated, shown and received.”
Sandra Hebron

“An idiosyncratic, profoundly insightful account of Fassbinder’s cultural impact written with consummate elegance and wit, this book is a genuine one-off in the way it evokes an entire epoch by way of a fragmented personal response to the films.”
Kieron Corless

“Pavitra Sundar offers her readers a renewed understanding of the history and critical paradigm of Bombay cinema. She does so by focusing on how these films were listened to by women and by demonstrating that the act of listening itself is gendered.”
Dr Victor Fan

“There’s no more timely or urgent book on the list given current circumstances in Gaza. Yaqub’s contributors explore a strikingly diverse range of visual material and in so doing are able to reveal in rigorous, excruciating detail the appalling constraints that Gazan filmmakers confront, as well as their inextinguishable desire to find ways to circumvent them.”
Kieron Corless