UK photography prize longlist spotlights archives, memory and cinema

The UK’s leading photography and moving image book prize has put archives at the centre of the conversation, with its 2026 longlist dominated by work shaped by political memory, authorship and authenticity. The selection stretches from Pan-African cinema archives to Chilean exile filmmaking, a spread that shows how far serious visual storytelling has moved beyond straightforward monograph making.

The Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards, founded in 1985, recognise books published in the previous year and available in the UK. For 2026, the shortlisted titles are due in early June, with the two category winners to be named later in June. The winning photography and moving image titles will share a £10,000 prize fund, split equally between the two categories.

This year’s judging panel brings together Jermaine Francis, Fiona Rogers and Diane Smyth for photography, with Ellen E Jones, Agata Lulkowska and David Martin-Jones judging moving image. Their remit has thrown a spotlight on books that treat the archive not just as a repository of the past, but as a personal and contested form, raising questions around who gets to tell a story and how that story survives.

The foundation said the 2026 longlist also includes deeply personal approaches to race, representation, identity and sexuality, alongside ideas of “the other” and the preservation and transformation of the past. That mix suggests an awards landscape where the photo book is doing more than collecting images. It is being used as a site of research, memory work and cross-disciplinary thinking that reaches into cinema, history and politics.

The longlisted titles were shown at Photo London at Kensington Olympia from 13 to 17 May 2026, and will appear again at POST Brighton from 3 to 5 July 2026. The 2026 awards will be celebrated in autumn at V&A South Kensington for Photography and at the Barbican for Moving Image, underlining the prize’s position between the museum, the book fair and the wider moving-image world.

The foundation said it was especially struck by the originality of the submissions, describing the list as evidence of how expansive contemporary photographic practice has become and how visual culture affects everyone. Coming after the foundation’s 40th anniversary year in 2025, the longlist reads like a map of where the field is heading now: into archives, into memory, and increasingly into cinema.