Laura Pannack: Portraits, Projects and Photographic Approach

Laura Pannack is a London-based portrait and social documentary photographer whose projects are built slowly, usually over years, around young people and the passage of time. A talk by her was scheduled in London for 17 March 2020 and did not go ahead, cancelled with the rest of that month's public events as the first coronavirus restrictions came in. Her work is easier to follow through the projects themselves.

Laura Pannack

Pannack's own site describes her as a London-based photographic artist working in portraiture and social documentary, concerned above all with the relationship between the photographer and the person in front of the camera. She names "time, trust and understanding" as the conditions for the kind of picture she wants, and says her projects are research-led and self-initiated rather than commissioned. The list of work on laurapannack.com runs to ten bodies of work, among them The Journey Home, on the walk to and from school in the Cape Flats; Island Symmetries; Baruch; Young Love; Separation, on what Brexit meant for couples; Youth Without Age; Digital Self-Esteem, on selfies and self-worth; and Young British Naturists.

Young British Naturists is the series most often reproduced. It photographs naturists aged between 17 and 30, made over roughly a year spent with its subjects, and it is a good illustration of her method: a group defined by something usually kept private, photographed without either prurience or apology, over long enough that the sitters stop performing.

Prizes and collections

World Press Photo's own page for Pannack records that she received first prize in the Portrait Singles category of its 2010 contest. Her site also lists the Royal Photographic Society's Vic Odden Award and the John Kobal New Work Award, which is attached to the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery. Alongside those it records wins in the Lens Culture Fine Art Awards in 2009, 2015 and 2021, Director's Choice at the Center Awards in Santa Fe, the Prix HSBC pour la Photographie, a Firecracker award, a Getty Prestige Grant, and first prize in the portfolio category of the Sony World Photography Awards. The site notes that the published list is condensed.

Her work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, Somerset House, the Royal Festival Hall and the Houses of Parliament, according to the biography on her site. On the publishing side, a launch for her publication Youth vol. 1 was held at The Photographers' Gallery bookshop in London. Commercial representation is listed as Wyatt-Clarke + Jones, with fine art print enquiries through David Hill Gallery.

Where her approach sits

Pannack belongs to a strand of British portraiture that is documentary in its subject matter and studio-slow in its making. The sitters are found rather than cast, the project runs for years, and the pictures are made with the sitter's knowledge and cooperation rather than snatched. That combination is why her work appears both in press portrait prizes and in fine art award lists, which are usually separate circuits with separate audiences.

The practical consequence of working this way is that a project often exists as a book or an exhibition before it exists as a commission. Long-form portrait projects in Britain tend to be supported by prizes and grants rather than by editorial budgets, and the award list above is in effect the funding history of the work. The Royal Photographic Society's Vic Odden Award, the Taylor Wessing prize's associated commissions and the Prix HSBC all exist to pay for work that no picture desk has asked for yet.

The cancelled March 2020 talk

The talk billed for 17 March 2020 was one of many London photography events dropped that week. Free monthly talks in the city largely stopped at that point and most did not restart in the same form. This site is an independent journal and had no part in organising that evening; the date is recorded here only because it is the address this page sits at.

For other portrait and documentary photographers covered here, see the speakers index, and for the full set of archived talk pages the events archive. Two nearby pages are close to Pannack's territory: Alys Tomlinson and Liz Hingley, both long-project photographers working with communities and ritual, and Zula Rabikowska and Harriet Fairbairn on identity and belonging. Background on how such evenings were run is in our guide to photography talks in London.