2020 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist: Catalogue of the Year
Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation, in partnership with DELPIRE & CO, are pleased to present the shortlisted books for the 2020 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Photography Catalogue of the Year Award.
Each year, the Photography Catalogue of the Year category brings together a robust roster of books published by institutions around the world. This year’s list includes both classic exhibition catalogues and new interpretations—from the Yale Center for British Art’s beautifully crafted Bill Brandt | Henry Moore, and Weiss Berlin’s reimagined chapbook series by Anne Turyn, to this year’s winner, the Walther Collection and Steidl’s comprehensive account of the origins and significance of vernacular photography.
This year’s shortlist was selected by a jury comprised of Joshua Chuang (New York Public Library), Lesley A. Martin (Aperture Foundation), Sarah Hermanson Meister (MoMA), Susan Meiselas (photographer, Magnum Foundation), and Oluremi C. Onabanjo (independent curator and historian).
Courtesy of Rahima Gambo and Open Society Foundation
African Cosmologies: Photography, Time and the Other offers a capacious and considered view of contemporary practices across the African continent and diaspora. Published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at FotoFest Biennial 2020 in Houston, the catalogue weaves together an inclusive group of thirty-two artists, spanning across four decades of photographic practice, whose works challenge traditional notions of Blackness and transnational histories in relation to concepts of liberty, rights, and representation. Edited by Steven Evans, Max Fields, and Mark Sealy, this handsome and readerly volume features an iconic photo by Rotimi Fani-Kayode across the front and back, and bronze-gilded pages. In addition to each artist’s portfolio is a selection of essays, ranging from epistolary interviews to critical examinations of contemporary exhibition practices around African photography and artists. Reflecting on the combination of essays and selected artists, juror Oluremi C. Onabanjo states, “It offers a rich entry point for someone who is trying to understand contemporary photographic practice and critical discourse surrounding the African continent and diaspora.”
Courtesy the artist
Anne Turyn: Top Stories, Elena Cheprakova and Kirsten Weiss, eds. (Weiss Berlin, Berlin, 2020)
Top Stories, a prose periodical was a chapbook series created by Anne Turyn in the late 1970s. A student of linguistics, Turyn conceived of it as a literary series but welcomed the combination of text and image—a trademark of her own photographic practice. Each issue focused on a single artist, mostly women, some of whom Turyn met through readings and performances—such as Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Constance DeJong, and Pati Hill—and embraced the permeable creativity of the time in blending literary works with art and music. Top Stories and other work are encapsulated in the small, two-toned-cloth softcover book that accompanied Turyn’s exhibition at Weiss Berlin earlier this year. The unassuming format, halftone imagery, and raw typesetting all complement the improvised feeling of the chapbooks. Juror Sarah Meister describes the book as “the perfect marriage of form to content, taking an artist whose career has been flying slightly below the radar and helping to give texture and context to Turyn’s work, while also respecting the original format in which it circulated.”
Courtesy the artist/Bill Brandt Archive Ltd.
According to juror Susan Meiselas, Bill Brandt | Henry Moore is a “masterful work of scholarship.” Accompanying an exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield, UK, this large-scale, richly illustrated book is a thoughtful examination of the interplay between two brillianttwentieth-century artists: Bill Brandt and Henry Moore, brought together while both creating work depicting civilians taking shelter in the London Underground during the Blitz. The book takes the viewer beyond their first encounter and through the artists’ postwar period, sequencing works together to show their intersecting paths. “I love the mix of materials—Moore’s illustrations, drawings, and sculptures in counterpoint to Brandt’s photographs—which highlights the interconnections of each man’s craft,” notes Meiselas. The catalogue makes clear the immediate influence the artists had on one another and “leads the viewer to resee Brandt’s nudes as sculptural form, abstracted into stone by Moore.”
Courtesy the artist
Hommage à Moï Ver offers what juror Lesley Martin calls a “double delight” in the facsimile reprint of a modernist photobook classic, slipcased together with a second volume that offers curatorial insight and rich historical context alongside the original publication. “This is a great way to present the original artifact of the book as it was published, alongside new scholarship and commentary,” Martin concludes. Moï Ver is best known for his canonic 1931 photobook Paris, which buzzes with the vertiginous energy of the eponymous city. That same year, the Lithuanian-born photographer, whose given name was Moses Vorobeichic, published The Ghetto Lane in Wilna. To the contemporary viewer, the subjects might seem dramatically different—the modernist urban center of early twentieth-century art and literature versus the stolid if bustling Jewish quarters of Vilnius, Lithuania (Wilna in German; tragically the city would later be destroyed by Nazi forces). But both were vibrant European capitals in their day, and Ver applied the same avant-garde approaches of images collaged, double exposed, cropped, and placed on the page with idiosyncratic, constructivist verve.
Courtesy the Walther Collection
Imagining Everyday Life—a new, comprehensive account of the origins and features of vernacular photography—evolved from a two-day landmark symposium organized by the Walther Collection and held at Columbia University in 2018. With leading scholars and critics from a variety of disciplines and regional perspectives reevaluating ordinary images through the lenses of power, identity, political participation, and ideology, new narratives that have been largely ignored or erased are inserted into the traditional read of the vernacular. In redefining vernacular photography by its social function rather than its aesthetic features, and examining the agency of its makers, Imagining Everyday Life proposes a much deeper and wider discourse around vernacular photography’s history and role. Richly illustrated and supported by texts that are “rigorous without being ponderous,” juror Joshua Chuang states that Imagining Everyday Life “provides a multifaceted snapshot of thought around the problematics of vernacular photography,” and is truly “an essential reconsideration of the topic.”
These text were originally published in Issue #18 of The PhotoBook Review.
The 2020 Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Shortlist Exhibition will be on view at DELPIRE & CO through December 24, 2020. Read more about the 2020 PhotoBook Award Winners here.
