The shortlisted titles for the Best Photography Book are:
- Oil by Edward Burtynsky (Steidl)
- Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans by Robert Frank, edited by Sarah Greenough (Steidl)
- Paul Graham by Paul Graham (Steidl)
- Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s by Ryūichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian (Aperture Foundation)
The shortlisted titles for the Best Moving Image Book are:
- The Tactile Eye by Jennifer M. Barker (University of California Press)
- Being Hal Ashby: The Life of a Hollywood Rebel by Nick Dawson (The University Press of Kentucky)
- Eisenstein on the Audiovisual by Robert Robertson (I. B. Tauris)
- The New Yorker Theater by Toby Talbot (Columbia University Press)
- Michael Haneke’s Cinema by Catherine Wheatley (Berghahn Books)
Over 150 titles were submitted across the two categories for the awards, which have been narrowed down to a final nine books by the two judging panels chaired by Philippe Garner (Photography) and Francine Stock (Moving Image). The judges were looking for clearly written, well illustrated works, which make a significant contribution to the understanding of photography and/or the moving image.
The photography shortlist includes: an essay by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, chronicling the infrastructure of the oil industry and the implications of our dependence on the fuel; an expanded re-issue of legendary photographer Robert Frank’s seminal work The Americans; a retrospective of Paul Graham, the pioneering UK photographer and winner of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2009; a survey of the Japanese photographic print culture of the 60s and 70s, which has since had a profound influence on photographic publishing worldwide.
Philippe Garner comments:
The field was strong and the excellent shortlist reflects a wide range of approaches. They include: single-minded and engaging investigations of sometimes very narrow topics, made riveting by the passion of the authors; excellent monographs on or by photographers from all areas of photographic practice; and a number of quirky, category-defying projects.
The moving image shortlist includes: Jennifer M. Barker’s theory that the connection between film and viewer goes beyond the visual and aural, to become something visceral; a portrait of the life of the underappreciated rebel 1970s Hollywood Director, Hal Ashby; Robert Robertson’s revealing exploration of Eisenstein’s ideas about the audiovisual in cinema; memoirs by Toby Talbot, co-owner of Manhattan’s influential home of art-house film, the New Yorker Theatre; the first English language analysis of the films of Austrian Director, Michael Haneke, by UK film critic Catherine Wheatley.
Francine Stock comments:
The books that impressed us above all were the ones that inspired a deeper love of film. The shortlisted authors each combined passion and original research in a format that suited their subject. Whether it was intimate memoir, biography, history, critique or a call for a radical new understanding of the way we experience cinema, these books were both focussed and involving.
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