Awards: Provoke wins Best Photography Book in the 2017 Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Awards

Provoke: Between Protest and Performance by Diane Dufour, Matthew Witkovsky and Duncan Forbes has won Best Photography Book in the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation’s 2017 Book Awards.
A celebration of the short-lived Japanese magazine, which ran for just three issues from November 1968 – August 1969, the book gathers the ground-breaking black-and-white images published by Provoke and combines with critical theory and interviews to show how influential the publication was. Exquisitely printed by Steidl, and checking in at 680 pages, it’s a comprehensive guide to the social and political manifesto which was put together by NakahiraTakuma, Daido Moriyama and Takanashi Yutaka.

Provoke: Between Protest and Performance accompanied the exhibition of the same name held at the Le Bal gallery in Paris, from 14 September-11 December 2016, co-curated by Le Bal director Diane Dufour and Matthew Witkovsky with Duncan Forbes and Walter Moser. But, as the judges made clear, it stands on its own right as a book.
“The publication is the product of an extraordinary amount of work, its content is historically important, and the four-party international collaboration that brought it into being should be celebrated,” says Ben Burbridge, one of the judges, and senior lecturer in art history and co-director of the Centre for Photography and Visual Culture at University of Sussex, Brighton.
“The visual material is extraordinary; the essays and interviews detailed and enlightening; the design exceptional. Provoke will have the historical longevity to justify its place as a winner – we have no doubt that people will still be looking at it in twenty years’ time.”
The other Photography Book Award judges were Martin Barnes (senior curator at London’s V&A) and Vanessa Winship (photographer). The two other books to be shortlisted were Looking for Alice by Sian Davey, and A House Without a Roof by Adam Golfer.
The seven other books to make the longlist were: Sugar Paper Theories by Jack Latham; The House of The Seven Women by Tito Mouraz; Magic Party Place by CJ Clarke; Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archive edited by Frances Turpak and Michele Brunnick; Maximilian Stejskal – Folklig Idrott edited by Marie-Isabel Vogel and Alain Rappaport; Highway Kind by Justine Kurland; and The Altering Eye: Photographs from the National Gallery of Art edited by Sarah Greenough.
The Best Moving Image Book went to Anatomy of Sound: Norman Corwin and Media Authorship by Jacob Smith and Neil Verman. The Kraszna-Krausz Foundation was created by Andor Kraszna-Krausz, the founder of Focal Press, and the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Awards have run since 1985.
www.kraszna-krausz.org.uk