Hat trick of awards to University of Glasgow Research Professor

Published: 6 February 2003

For the third time, Professor Larry Schaaf has been awarded the prestigious main prize in the 2002 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Awards

On Tuesday 4 February 2003, at the Arts Club in London, the main prize of £5,000 for the best book in the Art, Culture & History category went to Professor Larry J Schaaf for The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot (Princeton University Press, USA).

Schaaf is a Research Professor in the Faculty of Arts and an independent historian and consultant researching, writing and lecturing primarily on 19th century photography and its relationship to art and science. He divides his time between Baltimore, Maryland in the USA and Glasgow.

The judges described The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot as, 'Larry Schaaf's finest achievement to date - a beautifully written, immensely learned and novel view of Talbot as the world's first photographic artist, taking us step by step through his development as a photographer. All the plates are printed the same size as the originals and on carefully chosen matt paper, and each is faced by an eloquent and illuminating text'.

The international panel of judges hailed the last two years, the period covered by the current awards, as extraordinarily rich for photography publishing, with many books notable for their outstanding quality of reproduction and design. 122 publishers for the 2002 Awards entered over 260 books from 20 countries. The judges considered books dealing with the art, culture, history, craft, technological and scientific aspects of photography.

In an outstanding achievement, this is the third time Larry Schaaf has won the main Kraszna-Krausz Book Award. Two of his previous books have won the main prize: Records of the Dawn of Photography: Talbot's Notebooks P & Q (Cambridge University Press) in 1996 and Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot & the Invention of Photography (Yale University Press) in 1992.

Professor Schaaf is the Director of The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot Project at the University. Funded by a grant from the AHRB, this project is publishing full transcriptions of the nearly 10,000 letters written to and from Talbot, with publication expected by this autumn.

In addition, the Project's Corresponding Editor for Victorian Studies, Roger Taylor, won a special commendation for his Lewis Carroll - Photographer: The Princeton University Library Albums, also published by Princeton University Press.

For more information on William Henry Fox Talbot and the research undertaken at the University of Glasgow, please refer to Fox TalbotFor further information on the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation, please refer to Kraszna-Krausz Foundation

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Please contact Kelley Wilder at 0141 330 2944 or k.wilder@foxtalbot.arts.gla.ac.uk for further details. Alternatively, please contact the University Press Office on 0141 330 3535 / 3683 Electronic copies of the book cover illustration are available from the Press Office.

First published: 6 February 2003