For photographers navigating the difficult world of long-form documentary work, a brand new award has emerged with each severe clout and a significant goal. British photographer Laura Pannack has received the inaugural Tom Stoddart Award for Excellence, securing £5,000 ($6,700) towards finishing her challenge and a ebook cope with GOST Books.
The award, organized alongside the long-established Ian Parry Photojournalism Grant, attracted 184 submissions from 47 nations in its first 12 months; spectacular numbers suggesting that photographic group has lengthy been ready for this sort of assist.
Pannack’s profitable challenge, The Journey House from Faculty, paperwork the perilous day by day commute of kids in Cape City’s Cape Flats. However what units this work aside is not simply robust documentary pictures; it is the collaborative, multimedia method that judges praised for its “depth of collaboration” and “refined and layered” storytelling.
Throughout a residency at A4 Arts Basis, Pannack ran poetry and lo-fi pictures workshops with NGOs, youth golf equipment and faculties throughout Cape City’s suburbs. In partnership with organizations together with Challenge Hope, The place Rainbows Meet, and the New World Basis, she labored in areas together with Manenberg, Lavender Hill, Vrygrond, Athlone, Heideveld, Bridgetown, Langa and Mitchells Plain.
The ensuing challenge combines analogue pictures with poetry, drawing, portray and collage created by the younger individuals themselves; a inventive dialogue that judges felt supplied real perception into adolescent life, in a spot the place security isn’t assured. Briefly, this was documentary pictures as inventive partnership, somewhat than pure statement.
Ardour for psychology
It is usually fascinating work from Pannack, a extremely regarded British social documentary and portrait photographer primarily based in London who’s identified for her intimate, research-led, and long-form tasks, typically specializing in youth.
Her distinct photographic type blends a ardour for psychology with creativity, at all times striving to construct a deep, real connection along with her topics. This dedication to time, belief and understanding as key parts means a lot of her tasks develop over a number of years, permitting for a shared expertise that ends in extremely empathetic and truthful portrayals.
Extra broadly, her work is pushed by self-initiated tasks that discover themes of affection, vulnerability and the transition into maturity. She typically makes use of analogue movie, valuing the natural, unpredictable nature and the depth it lends to the feel and lightweight of her pictures, and her pictures has been exhibited worldwide, together with at London’s Nationwide Portrait Gallery and Somerset Home.
What the award gives
The brand new award, in the meantime, gives one thing more and more uncommon: significant assist for long-form documentary work at a time when conventional editorial commissions have largely evaporated. The £5,000 grant and assured ebook publication present each sensible assist {and professional} validation.
Its founding honours Tom Stoddart, the British photojournalist who died in 2021 after a five-decade profession overlaying a number of the late twentieth century’s defining moments together with the autumn of the Berlin Wall, the siege of Sarajevo and the 2003 Iraq invasion. His archive stands as a visible testomony to trendy historical past, and this award displays his lifelong dedication to supporting photojournalism.
Government director Harriet Logan, herself a 1992 Ian Parry Grant winner, says Tom Stoddart “could be immensely completely satisfied” about Pannack’s win. For photographers who bear in mind Stoddart’s uncompromising work (he famously mentioned photojournalists ought to “bear witness”) this award continues that legacy in sensible phrases.
Stuart Smith of GOST provides: “‘We had been very impressed with Laura’s submission because of the depth of collaboration she had along with her topics. This, coupled along with her distinctive eye, makes for a refined and layered challenge and publication.”
As a part of the award, Pannack will work with GOST Books within the coming months to edit and sequence the pictures, artworks and textual content, with the chance to journey to Italy to see the ebook go on press subsequent 12 months.