Kraszna-Krausz Awards Celebrate Photography’s Power to Challenge and Transform

The Kraszna-Krausz Awards have unveiled their latest longlist, highlighting photobooks that harness the transformative power of the medium to reshape understanding and examine identity, representation and history. The yearly recognition celebrate individuals and groups who have delivered exceptional work to photographic and film-based practice through published books. This year’s lineup showcases a wide variety of methods, from profound examinations of identity and sexuality to close studies of overlooked communities and fresh interpretations of historical events. The selected and shortlisted publications will be displayed at the Kraszna-Krausz Photobook Weekender at POST in Brighton on 4 and 5 July, providing audiences with an platform to interact with the most powerful contemporary photographic voices.

The 2026 Victors and Their Significant Tales

Among the current year’s outstanding longlisted works is Swan Moon’s compelling photobook, which combines 1950s nostalgia with the faded elegance of 1990s cinema. The luminous black-and-white portraits blend cinematic vocabulary with performative art, positioning each image as a frame from an invented film. Judge Fiona Rogers praised the work’s original perspective on contemporary youth, observing how Moon and her friends play central roles in a visual meditation on the persistent American dream. The book showcases the capacity of photography to create alternative narratives and reconsider personal experience through the perspective of cinema history.

Just as striking is Janet Delaney’s Too Many Products Too Much Pressure, a gentle yet moving study of her father’s final week as a cosmetics sales representative. The book blends candid photography with transcripts of conversations between father and his clients, together with thoughtful writing by Delaney and her mother. Judge Diane Smyth highlighted how the piece celebrates an often ignored group, uncovering profound humanity in everyday transactions. Through intimate observation and meticulous recording, Delaney elevates what could appear unremarkable into a poignant meditation on work, familial connections and the worth of daily labour.

• Black Chronicles uncovers long-hidden Victorian-era Black portraiture, questioning conventional narratives about racial presence in Britain
• David Alekhuogie’s A Reprise combines historical African art documentation with bold textile work, probing authenticity and creative authorship
• Swan Moon’s work merges portraiture with live performance, constructing filmic storytelling of youth and contemporary American culture
• Janet Delaney’s photobook pays tribute to marginalised labourers by recording lived experiences within economic relations and familial structures

Confronting History By means of the Photographic Archive

Revealing the Hidden Visible

Renée Mussai’s Black Chronicles: Photography, Race and Difference in Victorian Britain represents a groundbreaking work that deeply questions conventional historical interpretations. The book excavates previously unheard portraits of Black people from Victorian period collections, pairing them with Mussai’s careful historical investigation. Judge Jermaine Francis characterised it as “a gift of real importance and significance,” highlighting how the work dismantles entrenched falsehoods about Black British presence by demonstrating it predates the Windrush generation by many years. These photographs, ultimately restored to prominence after languishing in official repositories, constitute a vital gesture of historical reclamation and restoration.

The importance of this preservation effort goes further than basic archival work. By introducing these Victorian portraits into contemporary circulation, Mussai’s work actively resists the forgetting enabled by institutional indifference. Each image serves as a counter-narrative to the established historical account, showing that Black lives, families and communities were present in Britain’s cultural imagery well before mainstream awareness took notice of them. The accompanying biographical material turns individual photographs into complete human stories, restoring agency and dignity to subjects whose presence has been systematically overlooked by mainstream historical discourse.

Decolonising the Perspective

David Alekhuogie’s A Reprise undertakes intentional visual disruption, interrogating how African art has been documented, collected and circulated within Western institutions. The work recontextualises archival photographs from Walker Evans’ 1935 MoMA commission—originally designed to record “African Negro Art”—with vibrant contemporary African textiles. This deliberate positioning creates generative conflicts between archival record and present-day artistic practice. Judge Fiona Rogers observed that the book serves as “a reparative gesture,” simultaneously challenging imperial acquisition methods whilst providing alternative perspectives on originality and creative ownership.

Through Dada-inspired collage and staged photography, Alekhuogie refuses direct historical documentation in favour of playful yet provocative intervention. The work prompts viewers to interrogate the ideological frameworks contained in archive photographs and institutional collecting practices. By overlaying contemporary African textiles over archival monochrome images, the artist creates pictorial conversations that expose the constructed nature of ethnographic representation. This approach illustrates how photobooks can function as sites of resistance, where artists reassert interpretive authority and recontextualise imperial histories within structures that prioritise African creative autonomy and aesthetic autonomy.

Modern Challenges Captured in Print

The Kraszna-Krausz longlist reflects photography’s lasting ability to examine and record pressing contemporary issues through the intimate medium of the photobook. Janet Delaney’s “Too Many Products Too Much Pressure” exemplifies this approach, providing a moving account of her father’s last week employed as a beauty product salesman. Rather than adopting a detached documentary stance, Delaney intertwines photographic observation, transcribed conversations between her father and customers, and private thoughts from her mother, building a layered depiction of work, aging and social worth. Judge Diane Smyth praised the work’s “gentle, humorous and ultimately moving” perspective, emphasising how Delaney raises the profile of an often ignored profession and the interpersonal bonds it sustains.

This strategy illustrates how photobooks can serve as spaces for celebrating overlooked lives and communities within modern culture. Rather than dramatising hardship, presenting subjects purely as documentary material, Delaney’s work upholds the dignity and complexity of quotidian existence. The presence of customer testimonies and familial voices recasts the photobook into a shared repository of mutual recollection and warmth. Such approaches demonstrate photography’s potential to question established accounts about who and what deserves wider acknowledgement, positioning the photobook as a accessible form capable of returning presence and agency to excluded perspectives within the persistent commodification of labour under late capitalism.

• Delaney documents her father’s work relationships with customers and their private bonds.
• The book blends photographs with recorded dialogues and written reflections from relatives.
• The work questions standard documentary practices through personal, shared narrative methods.

Personal Insights into Identity and Sense of Place

The Kraszna-Krausz longlist illustrates photography’s remarkable capacity to interrogate questions of identity, representation and belonging through intensely intimate visual narratives. Swan Moon’s eponymous photobook exemplifies this methodology, combining 1950s vintage aesthetics with 1990s Hollywood glamour to create an imagined cinematic universe. Through luminous black-and-white portraiture and staged performance, Moon and her creative partners occupy central roles in a narrative that interrogates youth culture and the lasting legend of the American ideal. Judge Fiona Rogers highlighted the work’s “distinctive perspective,” stressing how the photographer utilises cinematic visual vocabulary to examine the aspirational desires that inform contemporary identity formation and self-presentation.

Similarly, David Alekhuogie’s “A Reprise” utilises staged photography and collage informed by Dada to mount a provocative critique of how African art travels within institutional structures of the West. By combining archival black-and-white photographs from Walker Evans’ 1935 MoMA commission with vivid African textile works, Alekhuogie constructs a reparative gesture that disrupts prevailing narratives of authenticity and artistic authorship. These pieces together reveal the photobook’s capacity to function as a locus of resistance against homogenising representational regimes, offering instead layered, self-aware investigations of how subjectivity is fashioned, enacted and disputed through visual culture.

What Makes These Books Important

The Kraszna-Krausz awards celebrate photography’s singular power to challenge institutional narratives and return prominence to marginalised histories. Renée Mussai’s “Black Chronicles” illustrates this power to transform, presenting a assemblage of Black photographic work from the Victorian era that fundamentally disrupts conventional understandings of British racial history. By uncovering images that have “lain silent in the archives,” Mussai makes the invisible visible, accompanied by detailed biographical information that grants these historical subjects agency and voice. Judge Jermaine Francis called the work “a gift of real importance and significance,” stressing how it challenges preconceptions about Black British presence by showing continuity rather than rupture with the post-Windrush narrative.

Janet Delaney’s “Too Many Products Too Much Pressure” demonstrates how photobooks can honour overlooked labour and social connection through close observation. Following her father in his final week as a beauty product salesman, Delaney builds a gentle yet profoundly moving portrait that includes conversations between her father and customers, alongside reflective texts from relatives. The work uncovers the personal significance embedded within commonly underestimated professions, recognising both individual dignity and the interconnected communities that enable everyday commerce. These books collectively affirm photography’s role as a means of societal validation, historical accounting and the celebration of shared humanity.