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Impressed By Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860 by Roger Taylor.

A new photographic research book written by Roger Taylor has won the prestigious Kraszna-Krausz Book Award 2008.

Press Release:

A photography book by a Leicester professor, which accompanies an internationally acclaimed exhibition currently touring the world, has won the prestigious Kraszna-Krausz Book Award.

Over the past 14 years Roger Taylor, Professor of Photographic History at De Montfort University, has gathered a unique collection of British calotypes - works of exceptional beauty and rarity made from paper negatives - from the beginnings of photographic art.

His ground-breaking book about the collection and the photographers behind them, Impressed By Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860 (Yale University Press), was one of six books across the world short-listed for the awards.

They are the UK's leading prize for books published in the fields of the moving image and photography, with a total prize fund of £10,000 split between the winners of the two categories in the awards; moving image titles and the photography category.

The winners were announced at the London Book Fair on Monday (14 April).

Prof Taylor's ground-breaking exhibition of some of the calotypes was launched at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art last year and is currently at The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and will go to the Musee D'Orsay in Paris next month.

The exhibition presents 118 works by 40 artists, including masters like William Henry Fox Talbot, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Roger Fenton, Benjamin Brecknell Turner, and Linnaeus Tripe, as well as unrecognised artists.

Most of the works to be featured have never been exhibited before and are loaned from 27 public and private collections in the UK, France, Canada, and the US.

Dr Gerard Moran, Dean of Art & Design at DMU, said: "The Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award is the most prestigious in the field and it's very fitting that it should go to De Montfort University's Professor Roger Taylor."

"He is a major figure in the development of Photographic History both here in the UK and internationally - as the recent exhibitions he has curated in New York and Washington demonstrate. Roger has been at the centre of exciting research in the surprisingly under-documented area of British photographic history - and this personal recognition for his excellent book is a most appropriate tribute."

Prof Paul Hill, course leader for the University's renowned Photography Masters degree, said: "This is like the Booker Prize for Photography and it's a wonderful accolade for a brilliant piece of internationally-praised work."

Prof Taylor's book will now join the Kraszna-Krausz collection of photography and moving-image books held in the National Media Museum in Bradford.

The awards recognise and celebrate excellence in photography and moving image publishing and were founded in 1985 by the prolific and dedicated Hungarian-born Andor Kraszna-Krausz, who was also founder of Focal Press.

Posted by at 6:55 AM | Permalink

About 800 images taken during the winter of 1942 by Dorothea Lange were unearthed in the National Archives.

Dorothea Lange is best known from her photographs of migrant farmers in the Depression for the Farm Security Administration. Seemingly unstaged and unlighted, the pictures of the internees compress intense human emotion into carefully composed frames. Nearly all of the assembly centers Lange visited, the government tried to restrict her. She was not allowed to photograph the wire fences, the watchtowers with searchlights, the armed guards or any sign of resistance and was discouraged from talking to detainees.

Lange's work shows the reality of life during this time in American history when about 110,000 men, women, and children, who abandoned their property and belongings, were herded into horse stalls and and tar-paper shacks where they suffered from brutal heat and bitter cold and filth.

From Publishers Weekly
When America's War Relocation Authority hired Dorothea Lange to photograph the internment of Japanese-Americans in 1942, they put a few restrictions on her work. Barbed wire, watchtowers and armed soldiers were off limits, they declared. And no pictures of resistance, either. They wanted the roundup and sequestering of Japanese-Americans documented—but not too well. Working within these limits, Lange, who is best known for her photographs of migrant farmers during the Depression, nonetheless produced images whose content so opposed the federal objective of demonizing Japanese-Americans that the vast majority of the photographs were suppressed throughout WWII (97% of them have never been published at all). Editors Gordon and Okihiro set this first collection of Lange's internment work within technical, cultural and historical contexts. Gordon (The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction) discusses Lange's professional methods and the formation of her "democratic-populist" beliefs. Okihiro (Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II) traces the history of prejudice against Japanese Americans, with emphasis on internees' firsthand accounts. But the bulk of the book is given over to Lange's photographs. Several of these are as powerful as her most stirring work, and the final image—of a grandfather in the desolate Manzanar Center looking down in anguish at the grandson between his knees—is worth the price of the book alone. 104 photos, 2 maps. (Nov.)
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Posted by at 6:57 AM | Permalink

"Eyes to Fly With: Portraits, Self-Portraits, and Other Photographs"

Graciela Iturbide has found her inner theme photographing the Zapotec women of Juchitan and the Mixtec goat butchers of Oaxaca, in the company of Nobel laureates and world-renowned artists, among mourners at Mexican cemeteries and Indian death houses. Each image stands on its artistic own, but each also tells something about the fascinating artist who made it. In Eyes to Fly With, which includes both iconic images and previously unpublished work, Graciela Iturbide has assembled both a retrospective of her career and an introspective self-portrait—in short, an artist's art book.

In the late 1960s, the great Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo took Iturbide as his assistant. It was a fond and fruitful apprenticeship, but Iturbide eventually sought her own career because, as she says in a conversation with the writer Fabienne Bradu, "I had to have influences, but I also had to suppress them and achieve my own expression." This book pulls together Iturbide's most expressive work, including select self-portraits. Bradu's interview, which appears in both English and Spanish, reveals the stories behind classic images such as "Our Lady of the Iguanas." (Did she pose the iguanas on that woman's head, or was it photographic serendipity?) Bradu also draws out intimate reflections on photography, Mexico, M. A. Bravo, famous friends, indigenous mythology, death, and dreams, so that turning the page to a viejo gazing at airborne gulls, it's impossible not to hear Iturbide's words, "One day... I dreamed a sentence over and over: 'In my country I will plant birds.'" Filled with such personal images and Iturbide's own voice, Eyes to Fly With is the private tour of the artist's apartment that every admirer dreams of taking.

Pub. 10/06, 12 x 12 in., 210 pp., 115 duotone photos, $50.00

Posted by at 8:53 AM | Permalink