Talking Pictures is a collaboration between Hamelin Association and Steven Guarnaccia, conceived in 2018 in partnership with the Bologna Children’s Book Fair and Publishers Weekly, on the occasion of the first New York Rights Fair, to explore the cultural importance and ongoing impact of the contemporary international visual book. Talking Pictures aims to fully explore this rich territory, in which various sectors of book publishing, for adult and children interconnect and cross-pollinate, thus giving life to new forms of visual language and new literary and publishing entities, encompassing the full range of areas of creative expression. It is interested in those books that blur the borders between contemporary commercial publishing and the latest currents in small-press book-making. Talking Pictures 2024 focuses on one region, Ukraine.
For participation in the Talking Pictures initiative, the Book Arsenal team accepted the editions that were published during 2021-2024 by Ukrainian publishing houses and created by Ukrainian authors, illustrators, designers, and photographers for the adult audience.
Based on the editions received from Book Arsenal, the international jury of the Talking Pictures initiative compiled a collection of 54 visual editions for the adult audience, that were exhibited at this year’s Bologna Children’s Book Fair on April 8-11 and was also presented at the 12th Book Arsenal from May 30 to June 2 this year.
From them the international jury chose the winner—the Telegraf Design series of periodicals from Projector Publishing. The author of the visual solution of this edition is invited to attend the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in 2025.
Special mentions were awarded to:
- NIKIFOR by Myroslava Mudrak from the RODOVID publishing house and the Ukrainian Museum in New York (2023),
- The God of Freedom by Yuliya Musakovska from The Old Lion Publishing House (2021),
- Hometown by Ruslana Kliuchko, self-published (2023).
The full list of Ukrainian visual books included in the Talking Pictures collection can be found here:
Bologna Children’s Book Fair is three global book events for the international trade in rights and licenses that take place annually in the eponymous Italian city, where culture interacts with style and commercial relations are established.
BolognaBookPlus (BBPlus) was launched by the BCBF/BolognaFiere in 2020 in collaboration with the Italian Publishers Association (AIE) to reach the global book publishing audience through a three-day program of the exhibition, training, conferences and other opportunities that occur in parallel with the well-known Bologna Children’s Book Fair on April 8-10, 2024. Led by the Guest Director Jacks Thomas and supported by the UK team, BolognaBookPlus works closely with the Bologna Children’s Book Fair team.