Witness/Memory/Recall

The Kraszna-Krausz foundation is delighted to announce that a new book display curated in collaboration with the V&A titled, Witness/Memory/Recall is now open in the V&A Photography Centre and is scheduled to be on view through to May 2024.

The display celebrates past winners and longlisted entries of the Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award. Inaugurated in 1985, the award recognises outstanding books on photography and the moving image with an emphasis on those works that combine images and text.

Witness/Memory/Recall includes books by artists including Laia Abril, Dawoud Bey, Gordon Parks and others whose work bears witness to, memorialises, or recalls significant events, people or places. Shown on open shelves alongside the extensive Royal Photographic Society Library in the Kusuma Gallery, these display books are available for visitors to pick up and read.

Something that we have observed, and that has interested us in recent years, is how artists have made increasing use of archives - both personal and institutional - along with their own work to recall or revisit records of past events and share new interpretations or presentations of these accounts. This selection shows just some of the ways in which the photobook has been used to not just disseminate a visual narrative of an event or moment in history, but also preserve and recall memories of it. The objects in this display take a broad look at this idea, considering it within domestic and family contexts; around ideas of place and how this is impacted by conflict; and in relation to acts of oppression and social injustice.