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 40th 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 2025. Events celebrating the 2025 awards and the winners will take place in Autumn 2025. Previous winners’ events have been held in collaboration with the Barbican and the V&A.
The 2025 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 2025 and was exhibited at Photo London 2025 and Offprint London 2025.
The Three Shortlisted Titles for the 2025 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award
Outside the Binary by Linda Bournane Engelberth (Journal) – A series of portraits uniting people from across the world who identify outside the gender binary. For some, this can mean having both a male and female identity; something in between or shifting; or being androgynous or neutral and not defined through gender at all. An ongoing project, Engelberth hopes to photograph in Russia, Latin America and more countries in Africa with the aim being to portray people in as many countries as possible, to normalize and show people that this way of feeling gender exists naturally in every country.
Tee A. Corinne: A forest fire between us by Charlotte Flint (Ed.) (MACK) – An ambitious publication edited by Flint uncovering Tee A. Corrine’s radical photographic practice and offering a new perspective on its intersections with her work as a lesbian sex activist. Delving into an extensive array of archival material, featuring unseen photographs, contact sheets, ephemera, and an extensive chronology, it is a call to action that shows the ways in which photography, activism, and community can come together to create a powerful new visual language around desire.
The Dog Sat Where We Parted by Mahmoud Khattab (Self-published) – A deeply personal project, Khattab captures the vulnerability and fragility of military life in Egypt. Shot during his enforced year of Egyptian national service as an army doctor in 2017, the title refers to Antar, a stray dog with whom Khattab formed a close bond over five-mile walks across the desert. The work responds to Khattab’s feelings of intense loneliness as a soldier.
The Three Shortlisted Titles for the 2025 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award
Women’s Transborder Cinema: Authorship, Stardom, and Filmic Labor in South Asia by Esha Niyogi De (University of Illinois Press) – De uses film tropes to examine the ways women directors and film entrepreneurs claim creative control within the contexts of anti-colonial nationalism and global capitalism. The region’s cinemas have become staging grounds for postcolonialism, with colonial and local hierarchies merged into new imperial formations. De’s analysis shows how the gendered intersections of inequity and opportunity shape women’s fiction filmmaking while illuminating the impact of state and market formations on the process.
Screen Deep: How film and TV can solve racism and save the world by Ellen E. Jones (Faber) – A book about the immense potential of screen storytelling to defeat an evil both historic and urgently topical: racism. Jones combines her personal experience as a mixed-race woman with her professional expertise as a film and TV journalist of twenty years standing, and goes beyond the many film books and anti-racist manuals by demonstrating the connection between these two aspects of modern life.
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky (translated by Caroline Schmidt) (Fitzcarraldo Editions) – Kinsky, one of Germany’s most revered contemporary writers, documents the colossal task on which she embarks in reviving a decaying cinema, ‘mozi’, in a small Hungarian town near the Romanian border. Kinsky describes how she was compelled to act, driven by the irresistible magic of the cinema, a site rooted in ritual that is steadily disappearing. This is a powerfully eloquent declaration of love to the cinema and the collective experience of watching, beautifully translated by Schmidt.
2025 marks the 40th anniversary of the Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards. Since their inception in 1985, the Awards have reflected the changing landscape of photobook and moving image publishing, recognising 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). Past winners include leading figures from the worlds of photography and film including artists and writers such as Isaac Julien; Sunil Gupta; LaToya Ruby Frazier; Zanele Muholi; Edward Burtynsky; Susan Meiselas; Martin Parr; Larry J Schaaf; Mark Haworth-Booth; Griselda Pollock; David Campany; and Simon Callow. To mark the fortieth anniversary the organiser of the Awards, the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation, is planning a range of activities in addition to the annual book awards.
Further information on these special events will be updated at kraszna-krausz.org.uk
The winners of the 2025 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award (Photography and Moving Image) will be announced at the end of June 2025. The call for the 2026 Awards will be issued in November 2025.
