Announcing the shortlistees of the Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards

Today, the Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards reveal the long and shortlisted titles for the 35th edition of the prize, which comprises two categories: the Photography Book Award and Moving Image Book Award. The selected publications span artist-monographs and anthologies, critical responses to photography and film, and photobooks addressing urgent topics, including the environment, identity, and how photography and film play into our understanding of the past and the present.

A virtual ceremony will announce the winners this September, alongside an accompanying series of events, conceived in collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery, London.

“In my photographs, I make social commentary about urgent issues I see in the communities or places I’m in,” wrote LaToya Ruby Frazier. A magazine-like book, LaToya Ruby Frazier​, published Mousse Publishing and Mudam Luxembourg to coincide with an exhibition at Mudam, scoops a place on the 2020 Photography Book Shortlist.

So too does Photography, Truth and Reconciliation​ by Melissa Miles, published by Routledge, which employs several case studies to explore how photography has played a role “in facilitating processes of recovery, and in reconstructing suppressed histories, even when a documentary record of the events does not exist”.

The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows by Sophy Rickett, and published by GOST Books, is the third publication to make the shortlist. Last year, BJP-online profiled the project, which delves into the life and work of Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn, a little-known Victorian artist and astronomer, who lived in Wales.

Among the longlist is The Canary and the Hammer by Lisa Barnard, published by MACK, and New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion​ by Antwaun Sargent, published by Aperture.

The full longlist for the award can be viewed here, alongside the shortlist and longlist for the 2020 Moving Image Book Award.

From The Canary and The-Hammer. MACK. 2019 © Lisa Barnard.
At the filmmaker’s Cooperative. 1962. From I Seem to Live. The New York Diaries. Vol. I. 1950 to 1969 © Jonas Mekas, Spector Books.

Hannah Abel-Hirsch

Hannah Abel-Hirsch joined British Journal of Photography in 2017, where she was Assistant Editor. Previously, she was an Editorial Assistant at Magnum Photos, and a Studio Assistant for Susan Meiselas and Mary Ellen Mark in New York. Before which, she completed a BA in History of Art at University College London. Her words have also appeared on Magnum Photos, 1000 Words, and in the Royal Academy of Arts magazine.