The Kraszna-Krausz Foundation has announced the winners of the 35th edition of the Photography and Moving Image Book Awards. The annual Awards celebrate outstanding and original publications that will have a lasting impact on their field. In lieu of a physical awards ceremony, the 2020 winning titles will be showcased in a live streamed in-conversation event in partnership with The Photographers’ Gallery on 30th September 2020.
LaToya Ruby Frazier has been awarded the Photography Book Award for her eponymous book LaToya Ruby Frazier (Mousse Publishing & Mudam Luxembourg).
Published to accompany her exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg in 2019, LaToya Ruby Frazier includes works from three of Frazier’s major photographic series: The Notion of Family (2001–14), On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford (2017) and And From the Coaltips a Tree Will Rise (2016–17). With its commentary on poverty, racial discrimination, post-industrial decline and its human costs, the book leaves a lasting historical legacy and forms a pertinent contemporary commentary about the American condition. The almost magazine-like production values of the book add to this sense of historical ‘first draft’.
“In my photographs, I make social commentary about urgent issues I see in the communities or places I’m in. I use them as a platform to advocate for social justice and as a means to create visibility for people who are on the margins, who are deemed “unworthy”: the poor, the elderly, the working class, and anyone who doesn’t have a voice. I create depictions of their humanity that call for equity. That is what is dear to my practice and my position as an artist” — LaToya Ruby Frazier
Hannah Frank has been awarded the Moving Image Book Award for Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons (University of California Press)
In this beautifully written and posthumously published Ph.D. thesis, Frank applies a unique methodology – a frame by frame look at the laborious process behind pre-digital cartoon-making in the Golden Age of animation (1920–1960). Demonstrating how central photography was to “an art formed on the assembly line”, the book reveals moments of unexpected beauty and hidden history within the animated image. It’s often said that every fictional film is a documentary of its own making; Frank argues that the same goes for animation.
“This is an exceptional book: original, poignant, hugely significant and full of verve, with writing that is wry, neat and seductive. Hannah Frank’s obsessive focus on the single cell in animation calls on us to change our way of perceiving culture. Her intellectual range is astonishing: Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, André Bazin, Walter Benjamin, Sergei Eisenstein – all are invoked to get us to think about what animation is, and to forcibly remind us of the invisible factory labour that manufactured the polished, animated commodity. Hannah Frank has given us a perfectly crystalised intellectual project.” – Dr Andrew Moor, Judge, Moving Image Book Award
LaToya Ruby Frazier is a visual artist known for collaborative storytelling with the people who appear in her photographs, videos, texts and performances. Her use of the photograph as a platform for social justice and visual representation for working class families is rooted in her commitment to expose the violation of basic human rights and promote environmental justice, access to healthcare, education and employment and migration and immigration equity. Her photographs often become a source of empowerment that lead to creative solutions. Frazier will soon publish two new books: LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze, Renaissance Society, University Chicago Press, being released 2020, and Gordon Parks/Steidl Publications Book prize for Flint Is Family In Three Acts, to be published in 2021. Frazier is an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a 2015 MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow and is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York City and Brussels.
Hannah Frank (1984–2017) was Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work has been published in Critical Quarterly and Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and she contributed a chapter to A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood. She is the author of Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons (University of California Press).
Copyright © LaToya Ruby Frazier, Hannah Frank and Kraszna-Krausz Foundation, all rights reserved
