The annual Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards was established in 1985, to recognize individuals or groups of individuals who make outstanding or lasting contributions to artistic or photographic literature or the moving image.
Two winning titles are selected: one in the field of photography and one in the field of moving image, which includes film, television and digital media.
On November 19 at the V&A Museum in London, the Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award Symposium 2024 will take place as a free event open to the public.
Artists Hristina Tasheva, Alice Proujansky and Lewis Bush will present their award-winning and nominated publications, followed by a conversation chaired by Duncan Forbes, head of photography at the V&A, and a drinks reception in the Silver Galleries.
Hristina Tasheva wins the 2024 Photography Book Award for her self-published Far Far Away From Home: The Voices, the Body and the Periphery. She created this multimodal piece using contemporary photography, found imagery and archival research, as well as pressed flowers gathered from her visits to Dachau Mauthausen concentration camp memorials.
Tasheva was born in communist Bulgaria in 1976, and is now based in Holland. "I have been living in the Netherlands for 20 years now, which is governed by a parliamentary democracy," she says on her website.
"I walked the path from illegal immigrant to a holder of Dutch nationality and I am still struggling to find my place in society – this is the main subject of my artistic practice."
Far Away From Home: The Voices, the Body and the Periphery tries to answer questions of what it means to be communist today, or to define yourself as one, and how personal interpretations of history, and the politics of remembering influence our identities and perception of the future.
She shares the £10,000 (approximately $12,900 / AU$19,600) prize fund with Jie Li, winner of the 2024 Moving Image Book Award for Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia University Press). The project draws on a huge wealth of archives, memoirs, interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, to create a media history of Chinese film exhibition and reception that offers a fresh insight into the power and limitation of propaganda.
The awards are free to enter and open to publishers, authors, collectives and individuals self-publishing their works in a truly democratic celebration and recognition of incredible global storytelling.
The call for the 2025 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards will be issued in November 2024
Sir Brian Pomeroy CBE, Chair of the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation, says of this year’s winners:
"We congratulate Hristina Tasheva and Jie Li on their outstanding winning books. They have fully upheld the tradition of excellence which has consistently marked the Kraszna-Krausz book awards for nearly four decades."
As well as Hristina Tasheva, speaking at the event in November will be Alice Proujansky whose work Hard Times are Fighting Times was shortlisted, as well as Lewis Bush, who was longlisted for his work Depravity’s Rainbow.
It is a free event open to the public, and tickets can be booked through the V&A website.
If this has inspired you to enter next year, why not take a look at the best professional cameras, the best cinema cameras, and the best coffee table books on photography.
