2025 Book Awards
The longlists for the 2025 Photography and Moving Image Book Awards have been announced
The Self is at the core of the twenty titles longlisted for the 2025 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards in its 40th Anniversary Year. The selected books will be available to browse at Photo London from the 14-18 May.

Colonial and familial archives; cultural hybridity; intergenerational storytelling; notions of ‘the self’ and of ‘the other’; the preservation and also transformation of the past; and deeply personal approaches to identity, gender and sexuality are some of the themes considered among the 20 longlisted titles for the 40th edition of the Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards.
Following the longlist announcement, six shortlisted publications, three in the Photography category and three in the Moving Image category, will be announced in early June 2025. The winner of each category, sharing a £10,000 prize fund, will be announced later in the month. Events celebrating the 2025 awards and the winners will take place in the Autumn.
Kraszna-Krausz Foundation at Photo London
(Booth P01, Publishing Section, East Wing)
Preview Day: 14th May
Open: Thursday 15th May – Sunday 18th May
Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA
For more info and ticket details, please visit the Photo London website.
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. The Awards celebrate creativity and rigour within the publishing industry.
2025 Photography Book Award Longlist
“Al-Arashi’s debut artist’s book is a striking exploration of matriarchal heritage, blending photography, prose, and poetry to create a deeply personal archive. Inspired by her great-grandmother Aisha, and unable to return to Yemen, Al-Arashi journeyed through the MENA region, capturing women of the same generation. In doing so, she resists erasure and redefines their stories. Emotionally powerful and culturally essential, this book heralds a bold new voice in contemporary photography.”
Dr Taous Dahmani
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Dr Sunil Gupta
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Dr Sunil Gupta
“Jeano Edwards’ In the Dark, the Tides Shine Bright is a poignant companion to his film, offering a contemplative exploration of the emotional landscapes tied to returning to one’s roots. Through this reflective work, Edwards invites readers to engage with the layered narratives of longing, loss, and return. While the film conveys immediacy, the book’s form allows for a deeper, more nuanced reflection, revealing the story’s subtle dimensions through the stillness of photography.”
Dr Taous Dahmani
“A forest fire between us is a new publication destined to become the go-to text on photographer Tee A Corinne. The reproductions are accompanied by a detailed timelineand new scholarship about Corinne’s radical art practice, which I think will resonate with a new audience today.”
Dr Charmaine Toh
“This was one of the most moving photo essays I’ve seen this year. A simple idea that was anything but simple to execute, Solomon’s self-portraits taken over 5 decades required an absolute rigour and consistency and resulted in a remarkable book that is a masterclass in autobiography.”
Dr Charmaine Toh
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Dr Sunil Gupta
“Through a striking blend of photography, prose, and illustration, Mahmoud Khattab explores the isolation, identity, and quiet resilience forged during his year of military conscription. Captured discreetly, his images offer a raw, unfiltered glimpse into the everyday realities of conscript life. ‘The Dog Sat Where We Parted’ transcends conventional military narratives, presenting service through a lens of vulnerability and introspection. Meticulously produced with a linen cover sourced from local markets, the book is both visually arresting and emotionally resonant. The jury unanimously chose to champion this self-published work—an urgent and moving contribution from a powerful new Egyptian voice..”
Dr Taous Dahmani
“While we received many entries that incorporated archival material, The Unruly Ar-chive distinguished itself with its clever book design that adroitly interpreted Syjuco’slayered photographic collages and installations as well as her excavations of historical documents and images.”
Dr Charmaine Toh
“Rebecca Topakian’s For Dame Gulizar and Other Love Stories masterfully blurs the lines between personal history and myth. Through a poignant dialogue between Armenia’s past and present, Topakian overlays images on transparent paper, symbolically merging history with contemporary landscapes. This work offers a profound exploration of love intersecting with complex histories.”
Dr Taous Dahmani
Dr Charmaine Toh“It is amazing to see how the genre of photo books continues to grow from strength to strength and how it remains such an important format for photographic practice. The books that left the strongest impressions were those that employed judicious editing and sensitive design to tell their stories.”
The 2025 Photography Book Award was judged by:
Dr. Taous Dahmani is a London-based French, British and Algerian art historian, writer and curator specialising in photography. In 2024, she curated two themed group exhibitions at the Jaou Photo Biennale in Tunis and unveiled a solo exhibition of SMITH at NOUA in Bodø, Norway. For FEP, she recently curated Anastasia Samoylova: Adaptation at the Saatchi Gallery. Her writing is featured in photobooks and exhibition catalogues, as well as in magazines including The British Journal of Photography, FOAM, GQ, Aperture, Camera Austria and 1000 Words. She has delivered talks at renowned institutions including Tate, the Getty Research Institute, the Barbican, Le Bal, and La MEP.
Dr Sunil Gupta (b. New Delhi) MA (RCA) PhD (Westminster) lives in London and has been involved with independent photography as a critical practice for many years focusing on race, migration and queer issues. A retrospective was shown at The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2020/21) and The Image Center, Toronto. A retrospective was shown at the Chennai Photo Biennale (2025) curated by Charan Singh. He is a Professorial Fellow at UCA, Farnham. His latest books are Sunil Gupta (Tate) and I Call you My Love (Baron Books), both 2025. His work is in many private and public collections including the Tokyo Museum of Photography, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Royal Ontario Museum, Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.
Dr Charmaine Toh is Senior Curator, International Art (Photography) at Tate. Her research interests include alternative histories of photography and the colonial photographic archive. In her former role as Senior Curator at National Gallery Singapore, she curated Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia (2022), which was the first major survey of photography in the region. She was also co-curator for the Singapore Biennale (2013). Charmaine is the author of Imagining Singapore: Pictorial Photography from the 1950s to the 1970s (Brill, 2023) and is currently working on an exhibition about the expanded global histories of Pictorialism.
2025 Moving Image Book Award Longlist
“Little Joe stands out as a vital and unapologetic intervention into film history, celebrating a decade of rebellious, queer-focused publishing. With its zine aesthetic the volume retains the raw energy and immediacy of the original periodical while offering a critical, lovingly assembled archive of gay and queer cinema studies. This captivating collection is an important archive of a community-driven project that contributes to the ongoing discourse around sexuality, film, and cultural memory”
Kamila Kuc
“Contemporary Art Cinema Culture in China is an ambitious book that mobilises new methodologies for uncovering how art cinema circulates in China. Through an excitingly diverse ethnographic approach, Xiang Fan takes a deep dive into alternative networks and communities of film appreciation in the digital era.”
Dr Kim Knowles
“Japanese critic Hasumi Shiguéhiko’s painstaking analysis of Ozu’s films has many admirers, among them director Hamaguchi Ryūsuke (Drive My Car, Evil Does Not Exist). But it’s been a long wait (over 40 years) for this English translation of Hasumi’s close readings of the Japanese master’s cinematic technique and it makes you wonder what other landmark books of film criticism could be out there in need of translation?.”
Isabel Stevens
“Under the bold title of Ellen E. Jones’ new publication lies a fascinating discussion of racial representation in the two most powerful forms of mass media communication. It’s a highly accessible, gripping and inspiring book that tackles racism with passion and wit.”
Dr Kim Knowles
“A remarkable and unconventional travelogue about a woman interloper to a small forgotten town in south-East Hungary and her headstrong but foolhardy attempt to renovate and revive the local cinema. This is a very unique and timely ode to the collective magic of all sitting together in the dark watching a film projected on film but also, to quote Kinsky, an ‘adventure in seeing’ itself.”
Isabel Stevens
“This book is a luscious and dazzling visual feast that redefines how we understand the emotional, political, and narrative power of colour in film. Especially noteworthy is its recovery of marginalized histories, from the overlooked women who pioneered early colour techniques to thoughtful investigations of how colour intersects with race on screen – challenging and expanding traditional cinematic narratives.”
Kamila Kuc
“Esha Niyogi De’s new book gives a rare insight into the role played by women in the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi film industries, drawing on archival research and oral sources. It takes a unique approach to the subject of authorship and makes an exceptional contribution to South Asian cinema studies”
Dr Kim Knowles
“Victoria Sturtevant’s analysis of pregnancy in popular comedy has a wonderful range – studying bumps and babies from the beginnings of the silent era, through the primness of the Production code years to the supposedly progressive present day. All delivered in clear, witty prose – with a very timely argument about how, in the light of the recent abortion ruling in the US, laughing about the realities of reproduction has a vital role to play.”
Isabel Stevens
“Crazy Fish Sing is a richly layered artist book that opens a rare and intimate window into the creative process behind Still Here, the forthcoming film by Suranga Katugampala. Through a dynamic interplay of drawings, photographs, and critical non-Western perspectives, Crazy Fish Sing reimagines how written and cinematic languages emerge across cultures to reflect on the restorative power of alternative modes of seeing and making.”
Kamila Kuc
“In his new book, Rick Warner makes a highly unique contribution to discussions of cinematic suspense, reframing it in the context of slow cinema aesthetics. It is likely to influence scholarly debates in both fields, whilst offering new insights into a range of films from around the world.”
Dr Kim Knowles
Dr Kim Knowles“I thoroughly enjoyed being part of the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award this year. I was surprised at the diversity of the books submitted and discovered many new approaches and insights along the way! It wasn’t an easy process, as the books differed greatly in size, scope, approach, methodology, style etc. How to judge a tiny book on one film against a huge encyclopaedia of an entire national cinema?! However, I found a way to navigate this by looking for books that offered something unique to the field.”
The 2025 Moving Image Book Award was judged by:
Dr Kim Knowles is an academic and curator based at Aberystwyth University in Wales. She was Experimental Film Programmer for the Edinburgh International Film Festival from 2008 to 2022 and has presented film screenings around the world. She is the author of A Cinematic Artist: The Films of Man Ray (2012) and Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices (2020), as well as the edited volumes Cinematic Intermediality: Theory and Practice (2021) and The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema (2024).
Kamila Kuc is a filmmaker and author, whose hybrid filmmaking practice considers complex ways to relate to one another through embodied, trust-building practices that foster collaboration and co-creation. Her latest film, Her Plot of Blue Sky (2023), premiered at the 27th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival. It is the winner of the 2024 British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Practice Research Award in the Short Film category and received the Jean Rouch Award at the 2024 Society for Visual Anthropology Film & Media Festival, Tampa, Florida. Her films have screened at many festivals and galleries worldwide. She is the author of numerous articles and books on cinema.
Isabel Stevens is a writer, editor and curator, and is the managing editor for Sight and Sound, a monthly international film magazine published by the BFI. Her writing on film and photography has appeared in the Financial Times, the Guardian, Aperture, Eye, Frieze, the Royal Academy magazine, Apollo and Source magazine. Isabel has contributed to programmes on BBC Radio, lectures on cinema and regularly hosts events and filmmaker Q & As, taking part in panel discussions and introducing films. She has curated film seasons and exhibitions of film posters, and her specialist areas of knowledge include documentary, design in cinema, and women in film and photographic history.