Kadir van Lohuizen spent a year travelling the American continent from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska. Most of this book is a portrayal of migration, which he sees as the single underlying motif of the Americas. Vía PanAm is a state-of-the-art travelogue and the panel needed little discussion of it.

The book is at once chock-full and balanced. Its bilinguality is handled through colour, purple for the English and brown for the Spanish. ‘This kind of colour differentiation can sometimes be nothing but a nuisance, but certainly not here.’

All the images are bled off, except that there are four page formats. Landscape half-pages are used for local colour photos and interiors. Narrower portrait-oriented pages have short portrait series. There are spreads for drama and beauty. And there are fold-outs for wide-angle photos. The backs of these fold-outs carry statistical information, making clever use of the same purple and brown.

The spread images are often not at the centre of a section, which means that you have to pull other pages towards you to get a good view of them. This radical solution helps you make connections between the people and their environment. What all the photos have in common is a vertical strip of white for the caption, a device that the panel thought helped bring out the qualities of the images even more.