CENTER AWARDS: Directors Choice: Laura Pannack
©Laura Pannack, From the series Youth without age, life without Death, 2012-2016
This week and next, Lenscratch will be sharing the CENTER Awards winners and the statements by the jurors to help understand their choices.
Congratulations to Laura Pannack for her Second Place win in CENTER’s Directors Choice Awards.
Laura Pannack is a London based Photographer. She was educated at the University of Brighton Central Saint Martins College of Art and LCC. Her work has been extensively exhibited and published both in the UK and internationally, including at The National Portrait Gallery, The Houses of Parliament, Somerset House, and the Royal Festival Hall in London.
In 2010, Laura received first prize in the Portrait Singles category of the World Press Photo awards. She has also won and been shortlisted for several other awards including The Sony World Photography Awards, The Magenta Foundation, and Lucies IPA. She was awarded the Vic Odden by The Royal Photographic Society Award for a notable achievement in the art of photography by a British photographer aged 35 or under. She was a judge for the 2015 World Press Photo Awards and divides her time between teaching, completing assignments, and working on her personal projects.
Her art focuses on social documentary and portraiture and seeks to explore the complex relationship between subject and photographer.
Laura is driven by research led self-initiated projects. In her own words, she does all she can “to understand the lives of those captured, and to present them creatively.” She is a firm believer that “time, trust and understanding is the key to portraying subjects truthfully,” and as such, many of her projects develop over several years. Her particular approach allows a genuine connection to exist between sitter and photographer, which in turn elucidates the intimacy of these very human exchanges. Her images aim to suggest the shared ideas and experiences that are entwined in each frame that she shoots. Laura largely shoots with a film camera on her personal projects, allowing her process to be organic rather than being predefined by fixed ideas, thus removing additional pressure on the sitter.
“Laura’s remarkable ability to build trust and respect with her subjects allows her to express a gritty vulnerability that is as sincere as it is elusive to capture.” Terry O’ Neill – photographer
©Laura Pannack, From the series Youth without age, life without Death, 2012-2016
DIRECTOR’S CHOICE: Juror’s Statement
Louise Clements, Artistic Director, QUAD & FORMAT International Photography Festival
Being part of the Center Awards Jury this year has been a real pleasure, the submissions were of a consistently high standard throughout and offered a great reflection on the current diversity of international photographic practice. The works shared countless points of view and unique visions, they varied hugely in terms of approach from street photography and portraiture to longform documentary, collage, archive, tintype, landscape and more. The hundreds of projects presented some brilliant, engaging and innovative photography from around the world, with so many valuable ideas, thoughts and expressions it was a serious challenge to select single winners from such a diverse pool. For me the most arresting images are the ones that make us think harder, look longer, read more deeply and those that provoke wonder. I’m interested in photography that dares to be different and that tells unfamiliar stories, aesthetically as individual images or in series, as well as pictures that disrupt expectation or surprise us, these are the kind of images that open your mind to new possibilities. There were many projects of this kind that stood out amongst the hundreds of entries, alongside these of cause there were many talents who are also moving in the right direction and should not be discouraged.
Inevitably for the awards I have made a very personal selection of works all of which resonated with me and demonstrated strength of originality together with a high level of visual communication and production.
Laura Pannak has developed a mythical project titled Youth Without Age, Life Without Death inspired by a Romanian folk tale that weaves a narrative red thread around eternal life and the analysis of time. Her work develops a fiction played out in through manipulated landscapes and original folkloric characters.
©Laura Pannack, From the series Youth without age, life without Death, 2012-2016
Youth without age, life without death
This project in progress takes inspiration from a Romanian folk tale exploring the notions of eternal life and the uncertain quest for our own destiny. It strongly draws upon the focus of time, cycles, birth and death. This is both a journey for the viewer as well as the artists’ venture for answers.
Time present and time past. Are both perhaps present in time future; and time future contained in time past?
If all time is eternally present, then all time is unredeemable.
©Laura Pannack, From the series Youth without age, life without Death, 2012-2016
©Laura Pannack, From the series Youth without age, life without Death, 2012-2016
©Laura Pannack, From the series Youth without age, life without Death, 2012-2016
©Laura Pannack, From the series Youth without age, life without Death, 2012-2016
©Laura Pannack, From the series Youth without age, life without Death, 2012-2016
©Laura Pannack, From the series Youth without age, life without Death, 2012-2016
©Laura Pannack, From the series Youth without age, life without Death, 2012-2016
©Laura Pannack, From the series Youth without age, life without Death, 2012-2016
©Laura Pannack, From the series Youth without age, life without Death, 2012-2016
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![In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, four members of the United Klans of AmericaÑThomas Edwin Blanton Jr.,Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank CherryÑplanted a minimum of 15 sticks of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, close to the basement.
At approximately 10:22 a.m., an anonymous man phoned the 16th Street Baptist Church. The call was answered by the acting Sunday School secretary: a 14-year-old girl named Carolyn Maull. To Maull, the anonymous caller simply said the words, "Three minutes", before terminating the call. Less than one minute later, the bomb exploded as five children were present within the basement assembly, changing into their choir robes in preparation for a sermon entitled "A Love That Forgives". According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".
The explosion blew a hole measuring seven feet in diameter in the church's rear wall, and a crater five feet wide and two feet deep in the ladies' basement lounge, destroying the rear steps to the church and blowing one passing motorist out of his car. Several other cars parked near the site of the blast were destroyed, and windows of properties located more than two blocks from the church were also damaged. All but one of the church's stained-glass windows were destroyed in the explosion. The sole stained-glass window largely undamaged in the explosion depicted Christ leading a group of young children.
Hundreds of individuals, some of them lightly wounded, converged on the church to search the debris for survivors as police erected barricades around the church and several outraged men scuffled with police. An estimated 2,000 black people, many of them hysterical, converged on the scene in the hours following the explosion as the church's pastor, the Reverend John Cross Jr., attempted to placate the crowd by loudly reciting the 23rd Psalm through a bullhorn. One individual who converged on the scene to help search for survivors, Charles Vann, later recollected that he had observed a solitary white man whom he recognized as Robert Edward Chambliss (a known member of the Ku Klux Klan) standing alone and motionless at a barricade. According to Vann's later testimony, Chambliss was standing "looking down toward the church, like a firebug watching his fire".
Four girls, Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949), Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951), Carole Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949), were killed in the attack. The explosion was so intense that one of the girls' bodies was decapitated and so badly mutilated in the explosion that her body could only be identified through her clothing and a ring, whereas another victim had been killed by a piece of mortar embedded in her skull. The then-pastor of the church, the Reverend John Cross, would recollect in 2001 that the girls' bodies were found "stacked on top of each other, clung together". All four girls were pronounced dead on arrival at the Hillman Emergency Clinic.
More than 20 additional people were injured in the explosion, one of whom was Addie Mae's younger sister, 12-year-old Sarah Collins, who had 21 pieces of glass embedded in her face and was blinded in one eye. In her later recollections of the bombing, Collins would recall that in the moments immediately before the explosion, she had observed her sister, Addie, tying her dress sash.[33] Another sister of Addie Mae Collins, 16-year-old Junie Collins, would later recall that shortly before the explosion, she had been sitting in the basement of the church reading the Bible and had observed Addie Mae Collins tying the dress sash of Carol Denise McNair before she had herself returned upstairs to the ground floor of the church.](https://lenscratch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/001-16th-Street-Baptist-Church-Easter-v2-14x14-150x150.jpg)
