PHOTOGRAPHY - 2023 Special Category

WINNER

Seen and Unseen: What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams’s Photographs Reveal about the Japanese American Incarceration

Text by Elizabeth Partridge
Images by Lauren Tamaki
Chronicle Books, USA, 2022

What the jury said:

The jury selected this book for the ways in which photography plays a seminal role in telling this story. Through expository texts, thought-provoking questions, documents, photographs, and original illustrations, readers are offered a complex set of ways to make sense of what happened in the camp. Three photographers’ works offer differing perspectives: Lange, through her lens of protest of the incarceration, Miyatake, through his hidden camera and an insider perspective as a Japanese American, and Adams, through his landscape photography and focus on the loyalty of the Japanese Americans as US citizens. This book pays homage to the power of photography in documenting and revealing circumstances that were kept impounded and hidden from public view during the war.

Qui veut jouer avec moi?

SPECIAL MENTION

Qui veut jouer avec moi? (Who Wants to Play with Me ?)

Text and images by Claire Dé
Éditions des Grandes Personnes, France, 2022

What the jury said:

This child-centric book invites young readers to turn the pages of a summer of dreams. Through beautiful graphic images, the artist plays with distances: showing the overall as well as close-ups, the focused as well as the blurred. Her characters are dressed with primary-colored stripes and polka dots, stripes and checks. The photographs are full of signs to be deciphered, and of references to other famous stories.

Cache-cache cauchemars

SPECIAL MENTION

Cache-cache cauchemars

Text and images by Jean Lecointre
Éditions Thierry Magnier, France, 2018

What the jury said:

The artist offers a very contemporary version of photomontage technique with his scanned, cut, assembled, and then digitally-coloured images. He plays with the ambiguous relationship that photography has with reality by transforming domestic environments into places of nightmare. In so doing Lecointre reveals the theater that is in the child's mind whenever playing or dreaming, and transforms children’s fears into moments of humor.

O adeus do marujo

SPECIAL MENTION

O adeus do marujo (The Sailor's Goodbye)

Texts and images by Flávia Bomfim
Pallas Editora, Brazil, 2022

What the jury said:

The blue color used in this book is reminiscent of early cyanotype printing techniques. The photographs are printed on linen, and ornamental stitching elements embellish and add another level of interpretation to the narrative. The embroidery references the protagonist’s stitching while imprisoned for revolting against the mistreatment of sailors in Brazil. Mixing media is typical of contemporary artistic and photographic languages. In this way, the author weaves the story of a life from the past to the present.