Winners of the 40th Anniversary Edition of the Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards

Mahmoud Khattab wins the 2025 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award for The Dog Sat Where We Parted (Self-published).
A deeply personal project, Khattab captures the vulnerability and fragility of otherwise unseen military life in Egypt. Shot during his enforced year of Egyptian national service as an army doctor in 2017, it is named after Antar, a stray dog with whom Khattab formed a close bond over five-mile walks across the desert. The photographs are an expression of Khattab’s feelings of intense loneliness as a soldier.

Ellen E. Jones wins the 2025 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award for Screen Deep: How film and TV can solve racism and save the world (Faber).
A book about the immense potential of screen storytelling to defeat an evil both historic and urgently topical: racism. Jones combines her personal experience as a mixed-race woman with her professional expertise as a film and TV journalist of twenty years’ standing, and goes beyond the many film books and anti-racist manuals by demonstrating the connection between these two aspects of modern life.

Mahmoud Khattab and Ellen E. Jones equally share the £10,000 prize fund in the Awards’ 40th anniversary year.
Additionally, the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation, which presents the Awards, will be curating events in the autumn celebrating each of the 2025 winners’ books. These will take place in London in collaboration with the Barbican for the Moving Image Book Award and with the V&A South Kensington for the Photography Book Award.


The hundreds of submissions to the 2025 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards, the 40th edition, reflect dynamism and demand in moving image and photography publishing.

Colonial and familial archives; cultural hybridity; intergenerational storytelling; notions of ‘the self’ and of ‘the other’; the preservation and also transformation of the past; and deeply personal approaches to identity, gender and sexuality are some of the themes considered among the 20 longlisted titles for the 40th edition of the Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards, the UK’s leading prize celebrating excellence in photography and moving image publishing.
The longlists—ten for the Photography category and ten for the Moving Image category—were announced in May 2025 and were exhibited at Photo London 2025 and Offprint London 2025. The six shortlisted publications, three in the Photography category and three in the Moving Image category, were announced in early June 2025.

The two winning titles of the 2025 Kraszna-Krausz Photography and Moving Image Book Awards have been chosen as exemplary demonstrations of originality and excellence in the fields of moving image and photography book publishing from the past year, which make innovative and lasting educational, professional, historical and cultural contributions to the field.

Taous Dahmani, an art historian, writer and curator specialising in photography, and Judge of the 2025 Photography Book Award, explains of Mahmoud Khattab’s winning publication:
“Through a striking blend of photography, prose, and illustration, Mahmoud Khattab explores the isolation, identity, and quiet resilience forged during his year of military conscription. Captured discreetly, his images offer a raw, unfiltered glimpse into the everyday realities of conscript life. The Dog Sat Where We Parted transcends conventional military narratives, presenting service through a lens of vulnerability and introspection. Meticulously produced with a linen cover sourced from local markets, the book is both visually arresting and emotionally resonant. The jury unanimously chose to champion this self-published work—an urgent and moving contribution from a powerful new Egyptian voice.”


Judge of the 2025 Moving Image Book Award, Isabel Stevens, a writer, editor and curator, and Managing Editor for Sight and Sound, the British Film Institute’s monthly international film magazine, says of Ellen E. Jones’ winning publication:
“A rousing call to action written in prose that’s never daunting or too theoretical. This is a highly astute study of racism across a broad range of popular film and TV, and let’s not forget, criticism too. I particularly enjoyed the probing interviews with filmmakers and how Jones eloquently analyses very disparate films, calling attention to many Black filmmakers who have gone under the radar in the process.”

2025 marks the 40th anniversary of the Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards.
Since their inception in 1985, the Awards have reflected the changing landscape of photobook and moving image publishing, recognising individuals who have made an outstanding original or lasting educational, professional, historical and cultural contribution to literature concerning photography or the moving image (including film, television, video, and new media).
Past winners include leading figures from the worlds of photography and film including artists and writers such as Isaac Julien; Sunil Gupta; LaToya Ruby Frazier; Zanele Muholi; Edward Burtynsky; Susan Meiselas; Martin Parr; Larry J. Schaaf; Mark Haworth-Booth; Griselda Pollock; David Campany; and Simon Callow. To mark the fortieth anniversary, the organisers of the Awards, the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation, are planning a range of activities in addition to the annual book awards.

Sir Brian Pomeroy CBE, Chair of the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation, says of this year’s winners:
“In our 40th anniversary year, it’s an enormous pleasure to be able to announce two such excellent winners of our photography and moving image book prizes. They are all the more notable for the extremely high quality of more than 200 entries from which they have been selected to receive the awards.”

Two judging panels, made up respectively of three internationally recognised experts in their specialist fields drawn from the worlds of fine art, photography, film, galleries, museums, academia and publishing, were responsible for deciding the two winners as well as the previous longlists and shortlists of the Photography and Moving Image Awards.
In the opinion of the judges, the winning books have made a significant contribution to the art, history, research, criticism, science or conservation of photography or the moving image. In addition to the visual and written content, submissions are judged on the standards of production, format and design.


The 2025 Photography Book Award judges are:
Taous Dahmani, a London-based French, British and Algerian art historian, writer and curator specialising in photography;
Dr. Sunil Gupta, a British/Canadian London-based photographer whose critical practice focuses on race, migration and queer issues, and the joint winner of the 2021 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award for his book Sunil Gupta: From Here To Eternity, edited by Mark Sealy (Autograph);
Charmaine Toh, Senior Curator of International Art (Photography) at Tate, whose research interests include alternative histories of photography and the colonial photographic archive.

The 2025 Moving Image Book Award judges are:
Dr. Kim Knowles, an academic and curator who was Experimental Film Programmer for the Edinburgh International Film Festival between 2008–2022 and has presented film screenings around the world;
Kamila Kuc, a filmmaker and author, and winner of the 2024 British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Best Screen-Based Practice Research Award for her latest film Her Plot of Blue Sky (2023);
Isabel Stevens, a writer, editor and curator, who is the Managing Editor for Sight and Sound, a monthly international film magazine published by the BFI.

Submissions to the Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards, which is free to enter, are invited from publishers, authors, collectives and individuals self-publishing their work. Books entered must have been published for the first time between 1 January and 31 December 2024 and distributed and available to buy in the UK. Non-English language books must be accompanied by an English language translation of all text, and submissions in the Photography Book Award category must contain a significant textual element, as image-only books are not eligible. Up to six different titles can be entered, with each having a minimum run of 100 copies.

The call for the 2026 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards will be issued in November 2025.


About The Kraszna-Krausz Foundation
The Kraszna-Krausz Foundation was created by Andor Kraszna-Krausz, the founder of Focal Press. Following his death in 1989, Kraszna-Krausz’s estate became the Foundation which now bears his name. Andor Kraszna-Krausz was born in Hungary in 1904. After studying photography and cinematography at Munich University, he began his publishing career in Germany in 1925 as the editor of Filmtechnik magazine. In 1937 he came to Britain as a refugee, and a year later founded Focal Press, an influential specialist publishing house for books on photography. Focal Press publications were an immediate success, gaining a reputation for clear yet authoritative text and illustrations. During Kraszna-Krausz’s lifetime, Focal Press published 1,200 books.

The Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards have been presented as part of Photo London at Somerset House, and the Foundation has previously partnered with the Barbican; the V&A, South London; The Photographers’ Gallery; the BFI; the National Media Museum, Media Space; and the Sony World Photography Awards.