KKF at the V&A, Photography Book Award Symposium, 14 December 2022

The Kraszna-Krausz Foundation is delighted to be collaborating with the new Parasol Foundation Women in Photography project at the V&A to present a special event celebrating this year’s winning title, ‘What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (10×10 Photobooks).

A symposium of editor, curator and artist presentations will take place on Wednesday 14^th December at the V&A in South Kensington. Hosted by Fiona Rogers (inaugural Curator of the Parasol Foundation Women in Photography Project), an international group of participants will discuss their books, the challenges and joys of developing a project for publication and their practice more broadly.

Whilst this event and content is curated for adults, we welcome parents with young children. We will also be live streaming, if you are unable to attend or access the Museum

4pm: Welcome and introductions
4.15pm – 5.10pm: Presentations by Russet Lederman, Olga Yatskevich and Bieke Depoorter
5.10pm – 5.30pm: Break
5.30pm – 6.40pm: Presentations by Dr Marta Weiss, Erika Lederman and Rhiannon Adam
6.40pm – 7.40pm: Drinks reception

Editors Russet Lederman & Olga Yatskevich of 10×10 Photobooks will join us to discuss the development of their seminal new anthology. ‘What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999‘ which sheds light on photobooks created by women from diverse backgrounds and addresses the glaring gaps and omissions in current photobook history—in particular, the lack of access, support and funding for non-Western women and women of colour. The book is beautifully illustrated with photographs of classic bound books, portfolios, personal albums, unpublished books, zines and scrapbooks, ranging from well-known publications to the more obscure.

Dr Marta Weiss will speak about the pre-eminent nineteenth century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) with special reference to her use of the book form. In 1874, Alfred Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, invited Julia Margaret Cameron to make photographic illustrations to his Idylls of the King. This was a series of narrative poems based on the legends of King Arthur. After her large photographs were published as small, wood-cut copies, Cameron decided to produce an edition illustrated by original photographic prints. She accompanied these with extracts from the poems written in her own hand and printed in facsimile. She claimed to have made as many as 245 exposures to arrive at the 25 she finally published in two volumes.

Erika Lederman will focus on Isabel Agnes Cowper (1826-1911), the first official photographer for the V&A Museum, and, in particular, Cowper’s role in relation to South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) publications and contribution to photobook history.   

Rhiannon Adam was longlisted for this year’s Kraszna-Krausz Photography Award for her book ‘Big Fence / Pitcairn Island’ (Blow Up Press). The Pitcairn Islands are Britain’s last Overseas Territory in the Pacific Ocean. Pitcairn Island itself (25°4′0″S, 130°6′0″W) is the only inhabited island in the group, and though it is diminutive in both size (measuring just two miles by one mile), and population (now fewer than 50), it has garnered widespread interest for the last two centuries. In 2015, Adam, inspired by a childhood gift of The Mutiny on The Bounty and a desire to capture the island’s fragility on expiring analogue film, made the long journey to Pitcairn Island. Due to the quarterly shipping schedule, she remained trapped on the island for 96 nights.

Adam will speak about the long development of this project and its eventual manifestation in book form. Designed to be as impenetrable and complex as the island itself, the book is comprised of two parts: Adam’s own experience of the island as related through her captions and personal stories, and a volume of photographs and related archive.

Bieke Depoorter was shortlisted for this year’s Kraszna-Krausz Photography Award for her self-published book Agata, in which she explores the complexities of the photographic enterprise and grapples with the relationship between photographer and subject. By diving deep into a collaborative working dynamic with a Polish woman, Agata Kay, that she met in a strip club in Paris, Depoorter creates a small alternate universe that served as a container for them to explore questions they each had regarding identity, performance and representation. Agata is a project that asks more questions than it offers answers, first recognising the well-worn idea of photographer-as-witness as a relative impossibility, then throwing all players involved under the microscope: photographer, subject, audience, and, of course, the medium itself. 

Rhiannon Adam was born in Co. Cork, Ireland in the 80s, and later studied at Central Saint Martins and the University of Cambridge. 

Adam’s work is heavily influenced by her nomadic childhood spent at sea, sailing around the world with her parents on their live-abord boat, Jannes. Little photographic evidence of this period in her life exists, igniting an interest in the influence of photography on recall, the notion of the photograph as a physical object, and the image as an intersection between fact and fiction – themes that continue throughout her work. 

Her long-term projects straddle art photography and social documentary, while subject matter is often focused on narratives relating to myth, loneliness, and the passage of time. The results of these explorations are captured almost exclusively in ambient light through the hazy abstraction of degrading instant-film materials and colour negative film. Her exhibition work often adopts a multimedia approach, and makes use of archival materials and installation to reframe received ideas.

Her work has been showcased widely both through the press and in exhibitions, most recently at the Martin Parr Foundation, The Photographers’ Gallery, Photo Vogue Festival and the Recontres d’Arles. In 2020, she was awarded the Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography, leading to the publication of Big Fence / Pitcairn Island.  
Instagram: @rhiannon_adam | Twitter: @blackbirdsfly | www.rhiannonadam.com

Bieke Depoorter received a master’s degree in photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent in 2009. Three years later, at 25 years old, she was made a nominee of the photo cooperative Magnum Photos, where she was named a full member in 2016. Depoorter has won several awards and honors, including the Magnum Expression Award, The Larry Sultan award and the Prix Levallois. She recently got nominated for the Deutsche Börse Foundation Photography Prize.

She has published five books: Agata, Ou Menya, I am About to Call it a Day, As it May Be, and Sète#15. She worked together with Aperture, Editions Xavier Barral, Edition Patrick Frey, Lannoo, Hannibal, and Le bec en l’air to publish these books. In 2020, Depoorter started her own publishing platform ‘Des Palais’, together with Tom Callemin. The published the second edition of Agata earlier this year.

Erika Lederman is a Cataloguer at the Victoria & Albert Museum, which she joined in 2008. She is currently studying for a PhD at the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University and the V&A, through the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award scheme. Her thesis examines nineteenth-century female institutional photographers, assessing the socio-political contexts that shaped their careers and subsequently perpetuated their exclusion from prevailing photographic histories.

Russet Lederman is a writer, editor and photobook collector who lives in New York City. She has taught art writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York and writes on photobooks for print and online journals, including FOAM, The Eyes, IMA, Aperture and the International Center of Photography. She is a co-founder of the 10×10 Photobooks platform, co-edits The Gould Collection, and has lectured internationally on photobooks at The Museum of Modern Art, Tate, Fotografiska, Paris Photo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. Her publishing and digital projects have received awards and grants from Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation, AIGA, Prix Ars Electronica and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Dr Marta Weiss is Senior Curator of Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London, and Lead Curator of the expansion of the V&A Photography Centre, opening in Spring 2023.  Originally from New York, she studied history of art, with a specialisation in photography, at Harvard (BA) and Princeton (MA, PhD). She joined the V&A in 2007 after two years in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  At the V&A, she has curated over 10 exhibitions, including Julia Margaret Cameron (2015), which toured around the world; The Camera Exposed (2016); Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience 1950s-1990s (2015); Making It Up: Photographic Fictions (2013); and Light from the Middle East: New Photography (2012). Her books include Autofocus: The Car in Photography (2019); Making It Up: Photographic Fictions (2018) and Julia Margaret Cameron: Photographs to electrify you with delight and startle the world (2015).

Olga Yatskevich is a co-founder of the 10×10 Photobooks, a multi-platform ongoing series of projects highlighting photobooks and engaging the photobook community. She co-edited the most recent 10×10 publication, What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (2021), the next project in its ongoing exploration of photobook history. Olga is a contributing writer for Collector Daily, a platform that offers photography criticism from a collector’s perspective. She lives and works in New York City.  

The V&A Parasol Women in Photography project is an ambitious new curatorial programme which aims to address historic gender imbalances by foregrounding and sustaining women’s practice in photography and investigating the role women have played throughout the history of the medium. Through a wide-ranging program of acquisitions, research, education, displays and public events, it will focus on international contemporary practitioners and gaps in the historic collection, complemented by a significant online presence to help reach and engage with new audiences.