LONDON.- The Kraszna-Krausz Foundation announces the winners for their Book Awards championing books in photography and moving image. Recognising practitioners who have made an original and lasting educational, professional, historical and cultural contribution to the fields of photography and moving image books, the Awards celebrate excellence, seeking to broaden perceptions on the importance of books in both fields.
Winning the Award for Best Photography Book 2017 is Provoke: Between Protest and Performance by Diane Dafour, Matthew Witkovsky, Duncan Forbes and for Best Moving Image Book Anatomy of Sound: Norman Corwin and Media Authorship by Jacob Smith and Neil Verman, with the prize money of £10,000 being divided between each Award.
These exceptional and varied books were chosen by an international panel of leading photography professionals after an open call for submissions. The judging panel included Martin Barnes (Senior Curator, Photographs, V&A); Vanessa Winship (Photographer); Ben Burbridge (Senior Lecturer, University of Sussex); Larsuhka Ivan-Zadeh (Film Editor, Metro newspaper) and Professor Peter Stanfield (Lecturer in Film, University of Kent and co-director of the Centre For the Interdisciplinary Study of Film and the Moving Image.)
Provoke: Between Protest and Performance by Diane Dafour, Matthew Witkovsky, eds. (Steidl)
The Tokyo magazine Provoke was short-lived, existing only for three issues over the nine months November 1968 - August 1969. It is widely recognized as a major achievement in world photography of the postwar era, uniting the country’s most contentious examples of protest photography, vanguard fine art, and critical theory of the late 1960s and early 70s. Provoke is accordingly treated in this work as a model synthesis of the complexities and overlapping uses of photography in postwar Japan, crystallising progressive art photography and cultural criticism during these times. The writing and images by Provoke’s members – critic Koji Taki, poet Takahiko Okada, photographers Takuma Nakahira, Yutaka Takanashi, Daido Moriyama – were suffused with the tactics developed in some Japanese protest books which made use of innovative graphic design and provocatively “poor” materials. Recording live actions, photography in these years was also an expressive form suited to emphasize and critique the mythologies of modern life with a wide spectrum of performing artists such as Nobuyoshi Araki, Koji Enokura and Jiro Takamatsu. This catalogue accompanies the first exhibition ever to be held about the magazine and its creators and focuses on its historical context.
“The publication is the product of an extraordinary amount of work, its content is historically important, and the four-party international collaboration that brought it into being should be celebrated. The visual material is extraordinary; the essays and interviews detailed and enlightening; the design exceptional… Provoke will have the historical longevity to justify its place as a winner – we have no doubt that people will still be looking at it in twenty years’ time.” - Ben Burbridge (Senior Lecturer, University of Sussex)
Anatomy of Sound: Norman Corwin and Media Authorship by Jacob Smith and Neil Verman, eds. (University of California Press)
This collection examines the work of Norman Corwin as a critical lens to view the history of multimedia authorship and sound production. Corwin is most famous for his radio dramas, which reached millions of listeners around the world and contributed to radio’s success as a mass media form in the 1930s and 1940s. Exploring the range of Corwin’s work and its influence on media today, the essays included in this book look at his distinctive ‘soundwork’ and inventive style, on the big-screen and radio. Anatomy of Sound underscores the political and social impact of Corwin’s oeuvre, engaging with its complex cultural production and artistic vision and cementing his reputation as a key writer in the history of sound media.
"Norman Corwin: Anatomy of Sound is an outstanding edited collection that provides an illuminating history of parallel and intersecting media forms - radio, television, cinema, theatre and journalism. The study embraces a range of approaches, including aesthetic analysis, production history, theories of authorship and political and cultural context. The book displays an admirable breadth in its reach without sacrificing nuance and complexity in its case studies." - Larushka Ivan-Zadeh (Film Editor, Metro) and Peter Stanfield (Lecturer, University of Kent).
