Text: Jin Joo
Illustrations: Ga Hee Lee
Publisher: Finger Publishing
Country: South Korea, 2024
What the jury said:
An incredible photographic story immerses the reader in the everyday life of a Korean childhood, in its poetic and elusive aspects, in the funny and hidden gestures, in the movements and visions of an instant, which make it universal. The act of waiting, an apple tree planted by a grandfather when a child was born, the apple that ripens, desire and time, the arc of experience and the dilation of the present moment, the relationships between generations, the body, taste and contact with the earth, play, complicity, the wonder of change. With delicacy and kindness, the work offers the reader visions of great and powerful beauty, suspended in a rarefied language that doesn’t shy away from nonsense or lyrical flow but plays with repetition and rhyme to tell the mystery of time and the meaning of childhood. Together with photographic and textual language, the typography plays a central role in the narration, emphasising the voice, amplifying and discussing its expressive boundaries: these pages are places worth lingering on with amazement to enjoy a slice of life, a world that is at once interior and concrete, and a mindful gaze that seems as if it has been enclosed and lent to the reader.
Calcio di rigore (Penalty Kick)
Text: Greta Amadeo
Illustrations: Lenina Barducci
Publicher: Pulce
Country: Italy, 2024
What the jury said:
The book focuses on the indescribable experience of the tension before a penalty kick. It offers an eminently visual storytelling in a horizontal format that serves to reveal the football pitch. It can be read from front or back, encouraging the reader to enter into the two viewpoints of the main characters: the goalkeeper and the striker. Both experience the sequence that precedes the action with bated breath, waiting, in a moment that both slows down and multiplies, in the perspective of the book by two and perhaps by a thousand more glances. The fulcrum, the centre of the story and the book, is in that exact moment in time in which the players are not alone, even if they are inward-looking and concentrated, but are surrounded and supported by the presence of an attentive audience – made up of a heterogeneous and diverse crowd that the judges particularly appreciated – who express their support for the two characters at the centre of the action, even holding up a sign.
Text and illustrations: Jill Senft
Publisher: Limonero
Country: Argentina, 2024
What the jury said:
In this large-format picturebook, the language of art and the existential search inherent in the very form of the collection (of an imaginary collector) welcome the reader with new visions, through the figurative reinvention of sculptures, works of art, contemporary objects and spaces by the artist Jill Senft. Through its quality and design expertise, the work demonstrates how the picturebook is a crucial place for contemporary artistic experimentation and development, capable of posing questions to the reader about the relationship between shapes and time, art and everyday life, the gaze and the body, the symbolic and the material, the museum and the home, the collection and the world.
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