Shortlist for 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards Announced: 6 Titles Celebrate Photography and Moving Image Publishing

Of the hundreds of titles submitted this year, six shortlisted publications, three in the Photography category and three in the Moving Image category, have been announced for the 39th edition of the Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards, the UK's leading annual prize celebrating excellence in photography and moving image publishing.

The winner of each category, sharing a £10,000 prize fund, will be announced at the end of June 2024. Events celebrating the 2024 awards and the winners will take place in Autumn 2024. Previous winners' events have been held in collaboration with the Barbican and the V&A.

The 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards reflects the dynamism and demand in moving image and photography publishing.

The longlist of twenty titles, ten for the Photography category and ten for the Moving Image category, was announced in May 2024 and was exhibited at Photo London 2024.

The 3 Shortlisted Titles for the 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award are:
Far Away From Home: The Voices, the Body and the Periphery by Hristina Tasheva (Self Published) - An ambitious attempt at mapping the disparities between two national experiences of Communism in the twentieth century - the Dutch and the Bulgarian - as they were impacted by the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. The book includes contemporary photography, found imagery, and archival research, as well as a pressed flower gathered by Tasheva from visits to Dachau and Mauthausen concentration camp memorials.



Hard Times are Fighting Times by Alice Proujansky (Gnomic Book) - 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.



Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body by RaMell Ross (MACK) - 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presents a potent visual chronicle of the American South and its landscape that is both mysterious and quotidian, a historical document and a radical imagining of the future.



The 3 Shortlisted Titles for the 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award are
African Cinema: Manifesto and Practice for Cultural Decolonization: Volumes 1 - 3 by Michael T. Martin and Gaston J. M. Kaboré (eds) with Allison J. Brown, Cole Nelson, and Joseph E. Roskos (Indiana University Press) - 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.


Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China by Jie Li (Columbia University Press) - drawing on a wealth of archives, memoirs, interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork this is a media history of Chinese film exhibition and reception that offers fresh insights into the powers and limits of propaganda.


The Rainbow's Gravity: Colour, Materiality and British Modernity by Kirsty Sinclair Dootson (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art) - 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.
Since 1985 the Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards have recognised individuals who have made an outstanding original or lasting educational, professional, historical and cultural contribution to literature concerning photography or the moving image (including film, television, video, and new media).

Two judging panels made up respectively of three internationally recognised experts in their specialist fields drawn from the worlds of fine art, photography, film, galleries, museums, academia and publishing, are responsible for deciding the subsequent longlists, shortlists and winners of the Photography and Moving Image awards.

Anthony Luvera, an artist, writer, Associate Professor in the Research Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University, and Judge of the 2024 Photography Book Award, explains of his judging experience, Judging the 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award provided a fascinating insight into photobook publishing over the past year. The breadth of submissions reminded me that despite the ubiquity of images in our everyday lives, the use of photography as a form of sustained inquiry or as a storytelling tool continues to hold enormous, revelatory power, enabling our surroundings to be seen and understood in ways previously unknown. The creative role photobook publishing plays in conveying insights into the work of artists and the world around us is important now more than ever.

Judge of the 2024 Moving Image Book Award, Dr Victor Fan who is Reader in Film and Media Philosophy at the Department of Film Studies, King's College London, said of the experience, It was an absolute pleasure to read so many vibrant, creative, and groundbreaking works on the cinema from the past year. Learning about new historiographical methods, previously overlooked perspectives on film and media philosophy and aesthetics, as well as freshly available archival materials was a truly inspiring experience. I am especially excited by how scholars, journalists, photographers, and filmmakers have actively offered new epistemes and epistemologies that help us decolonise and deimperialise film and media studies, thus enabling us to theorise, historicise, and create from the perspectives of women, trans and queer individuals, and artists and scholars of colour.

Sir Brian Pomeroy CBE, Chair of the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation, says of this year's shortlists, These six titles unquestionably continue our long history of attracting superlative books on photography and the moving image as entries for the sought after Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards.

The winners of the 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award (Photography and Moving Image) will be announced at the end of June 2024. The call for the 2025 Awards will be issued in November 2024.