Kraszna-Krausz 2022 Photography Book Award winner announced

The Kraszna-Krausz 2022 Photography Book Award has been awarded to the anthology What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 edited by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich.

The Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards, established in 1985, are open to all Photography and Moving Image books published in the previous year and available in the UK.

This year a total of 230 entries across both categories were considered.

What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (10×10 Photobooks) sheds light on photobooks created by women from diverse backgrounds and addresses the glaring gaps and omissions in current photobook history.

Most notably this is the lack of access, support and funding for non-Western women and women of colour.

The book is illustrated with photographs of classic bound books, portfolios, personal albums, unpublished books, ‘zines and scrapbooks, ranging from well-known publications to the more obscure.

The cover of What They Saw – Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 – winner of the 2022 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award

Panel of judges

The 2022 Photography Book Award winner was selected by a panel of expert judges including Dr. Lena Fritsch (curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum), Renée Mussai (senior curator and head of curatorial & collection at Autograph) and contemporary photographer Simon Roberts.

Speaking about the winner Renée Mussai said, ‘Rigorously researched, generously illustrated, and ingeniously designed, this is an extraordinary publication which not only fills an essential gap and missing chapter in photographic scholarship, but importantly foregrounds the creative pursuits of a diverse constituency of women, whose significant contributions to global photobook historiography still too often remains invisible.’

Book Interior – Postcards by Christina Broom in Isabel Marion Seymour, WSPU Postcards Album (gifted to the Women’s Social and Political Union), 1908-1914. © Museum of London

Outstanding shortlisted books

Belgian photographer Bieke Depoorter and Agata Kay’s intimate book Agata (Des Palais) and curators Peter Eleey and Eva Respini’s monograph Deana Lawson (MACK) were recognised as outstanding works in the shortlist.

Both the winning and shortlisted titles were chosen as exemplary demonstrations of originality and excellence in the fields of moving image and photography book publishing.

Agata explores an intimate three-year collaboration between photographer Bieke Depoorter and her photographic subject Agata Kay, who she met in a strip club in Paris.

It tells two stories – one of a sex worker searching for her identity and the other of a young woman continuously questioning her role as a photographer.

Germaine. Neuilly Plaisance. September 4, 2018. © Bieke Depoorter/Magnum Photos from Agata

Peter Eleey and Eva Respini created the first scholarly publication about the artist Deana Lawson, who recently won the 2022 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, surveying 15 years of her photography.

This coincides with a touring exhibition currently at MoMA PS1 until 5 September 2022.

Lawson investigates and challenges conventional representations of black identities in the African American and African diaspora.

Whether in posed photographs or assembled collages, Lawson’s work channels broader ideas about personal and social histories of black life, love, sexuality, family, and spiritual beliefs.

The book includes Lawson’s personal family photographs and archives of vernacular images that have informed her work.

Deana Lawson. Coulson Family, 2008 from Deana Lawson ed. by Peter Eeley and Eva Respini (MACK, 2021). Courtesy of the artist and MACK

Moving Image Book Award

American author, curator and art historian John G. Hanhardt won the Moving Image Book Award for The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: 1963–1965 (Whitney Museum of American Art).

The book features over 100 individual works which are catalogued in detail and combined with enlightening essays that cover Warhol’s influences, his experimentation with film, source material, working methods and technical innovations, as well as his engagement with the people he filmed and how they came to life on the screen.

The Moving Image Book Award winner was selected by a panel of film experts including researcher and curator Matthew Barrington, Pamela Hutchinson (freelance writer, critic, film historian and curator) and Dr. Melanie Selfe (film historian and lecturer in Cultural Policy at the University of Glasgow).

Warhol filming Prison at the Factory, 1965. Photograph by Bob Adelman. © Bob Adelman Estate

Special event at the V&A

On 5 October 2022 the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation will present an event at the V&A Museum, London, which will celebrate the Photography Book Award winner, alongside a selection of the longlisted books.

Hosted by Fiona Rogers (inaugural curator of the Parasol Foundation Women in Photography Project), an international group of editors and artists will discuss their books, the challenges and joys of developing a project for publication and their practice more broadly.