Laura Pannack

0:48 ones follow ups it's really inspiring really amazing so this project is actually quite old but I was just going to talk about it and kind of talk you more through the process of it which I haven't really talked about much in the past and but just before I do it just sort of give you a little bit of a background about the kind of work that I've done and what I enjoy shooting so I was at university something like that and I instantly became hooked with portraiture and the idea of kind of connecting with people and the masks that we put up one were being photographed so my first project was photographing photographers because they hate having their picture taken and what I did is I explored the idea of vulnerability so I asked each

1:36 photographer to close their eyes and I put a piece of glass in front of their face and then I left him there for an unknown amount of time and I stripped them of any control of the image that was going to be taken and it was just a serious exploring kind of for how they preempted it how they were going to represent themselves and how much they could deal with the idea of that control being strict and the vulnerability that was being placed on them and vulnerability has kind of become a thing within my process and the idea of me being vulnerable as a photographer in order to make my subjects feel more

2:07 comfortable and so earlier on in my work I started exploring people who I felt were quite vulnerable or possibly misrepresented so when I was at university it was the time of kind of youth culture where it's being represented really badly where there was this hoodie culture and I you know everyone has that three year long one year long project at the end of University where you just completely shoot yourself for nine months and then you kind of go oh yeah do something so this is that and I towards the end of the first year towards the end of the third year I started realizing that I was photographed from teenagers a lot and I

2:48 went on this two-week camp that was I guess it was kind of team building and it was working with affected youth so people that were people Referral Units or youth offending teams and I started realizing that my interpretation of young people and the way that I stereotyped them was really bad and I felt like a message needed to be put out there and I realized that when I was in the woods with 20 kids and you know we were all just kind of hanging out and I said to this little boy and he was like yay hi and a bit of a rude boy and I said what do you want to be and he was like I like oh you know I like well want to be in musicals like I think that's sick and I was just like what like I so

3:38 did not expect that so I kind of like when God I charged this little Roo boy you're thinking you know that he was just gonna rob me when actually you know he wants to be the next I mean he's like nice guy so I did a series of projects of portraits of young people and I stripped them of their environment and I sourced these young people from disabled schools from boarding schools from like said youth offending teams all over the place I basically lynched a lot of people on the street as well and I quickly learned about the process of scouting of modern releases of parental permission and just working I guess within the restrictions of working with young

4:16 people and also like how much I enjoyed working with young people there was an element of freedom and I guess adventure and I started hanging around with a lot of couples young couples and I then proceeded to do a project on young love and what struck me about it was that these young couples were really giving me access into their relationships in their lives and I would get phone calls from them you know oh my god you know me and Carter are breaking often and they bring me so five minutes later at 3:00 in the morning going it's cool we're getting married it was just this kind of like heightened emotion and this intense kind of and what I loved about these relationships is that they were built on

4:58 simplicity and I was sort of getting to the age of my mid to late 20s and I was kind of going hmm just this person you know provide for me this is before tinder this is like you know thinking of all the things like where they would take the boxes and then all these young people were just like doing what tinder does they were looking at these people and going are you fit and that was it and then they just have a relationship and hang out and have fun and I really I really respected that and I think it was the idea that you know it like they hadn't been burned they hadn't kind of had all these complexities kind of that they'd experienced through relationships so I did a project on that and I

5:37 continued hanging around with people and I learned that my process also altered between shots where I'd wake up in the middle of the night and I have an idea and I you know sketch it out very very badly and then I try and recreate that so almost like a tableau image and then I'd also have images that were very spontaneous and kind of reactive to the moments that I was in where I just see a shot of light and I go oh my god stop that like this image was very kind of like can I have cigarette in your car no you can't even lean out the window because the light is fantastic so it's kind of you know those kind of that I

6:09 guess that combination of those two ways of working so the project that we now speak about was a project on young British naturists and it was a time when I was just finishing uni and I was getting a lot advice that I was focusing on young people far too much and not in that way but like I was panicked I needed to kind of like widen what I was shooting and then don't judge me but I managed to Google young British naturists Wow young British naturists you know like why would people get their kick off in Britain . and then you know also at an age where you've got that kind of like that sense of self-awareness you're

6:50 exploring your identity it's a point of transition why do you want to do it so I contacted this organization and called young British naturists and on the 4 and a half hour drive to Manchester to go to a naturist camp I began to sort of obviously question my sanity and the way that this camp works is they run sort of four or five camps where they go to nature of sites around the UK and they bring together members of their community that are naturists under the age of 30 and I went along and I kind of I did this for about a year and a half where these people were giving me access to the camps and I was going along to the camps and I was meeting people and I was getting fairness but I found actually that I kind of felt like I was

7:33 invading their fun a little bit and you know they thought that I was going to come along like a Daily Mail photographer do a couple of snaps and then bugger off home or isn't that's the fact I was setting up you know a medium format camera and it was taking ages to focus and I was asking them to sit for me and I was it was just a little bit to kind of yeah and commenting on their time so I had two routes they could either give up or I could really go the long way and the long way was to really research and find genuine young British naturists that wanted to take in the project gain access to all the nature of

8:04 sites around the UK organize trips and take these young people to those nature sites which for some odd reason I did so it started off with me meeting these young people in their homes and I still see people through various ways one of them was skin book which was face book with the matrice lost blogs forums calling people are going to clubs and meeting people there and all I needed for these people to do is to be young genuine British naturist under the age of 30 and what I really wanted to do to get a diverse section of people so I kind of I wanted people that were naturist for different reasons and come about being a

8:46 naturist for you know like kind of they've grown up with it or their partners are naturist and then going back to earlier in this evening the young man Ben Roberts actually accompanied me up north because he's in northern lads and this picture of John was actually taken up north so I was I was there for four or five days and my process was contacting these people by email or phone going to their house meeting them taking a picture of them naked within their own setting where they're comfortable where something about them reflects their identity apart from being a naturist and then sort of going back home which sounds completely dodgy when you say it to your mum on the phone and you're on the way to Manchester and you're like what you're

9:32 doing I mean these four guys I've never met before they're going to get their kit off and I'm going to take their picture and then I'm going to go home so then I found out about this and he's like I will come and save the day and he did and he missed the most important football match of his life because he was shining a reflector and a penis for me so I have to thank that man so much here such so got some day memories and so I met these people I photographed them in their homes and I always wanted there to be this kind of this element of you know their personality and something other than them being naked and my best critic is my mum cause she's the harshest person in the world and I said to her I

10:14 you know I don't really feel like these images are working what is it and she said you need to stop photographing nakedness and you need to stop photographing people and that was a really good lesson for me and I soon realized that actually what it needed to be was that it was completely irrelevant that these people were naked and I just wanted to make something that was a little bit painterly and and kind of a bit dreamy and focus more on that person and took you somewhere as a viewer so I traveled all over the country doing this a lot of people up north I have no idea why no judgments and I got them to choose what they wanted in the picture it needs to be something personal so short and had attendee collection when he massively

10:54 wanted in the picture and once I felt like I'd really got like a good amount of people so say I don't know I had about 35 to 40 people I then decided to go and visit these naturist sites um in nature sites it is incredibly frowned upon to take any pictures obviously and this is also before kind of photography on your phones so you know if you get out of cameras there especially if it's a big medium format camera or you got a tripod it's just a no-no so I went around and I visited all these sites and I met the owners and I stayed with them for a few days at a time and I just got access to the sites and explained my project and show them what I was doing and once I had a referral from like Judy

11:36 and Jim you know they were like oh yeah she's fine you know I could go to Cheshire or somewhere else and what fascinated me about these sites is the fact that most of them are built in the 1930s and they're just maintained by the people that run the sites so it was also a kind of a weird flight if you're a 17 year old kid do you want to hang out and play you know ping pong or puzzles when actually you know you've got a Nintendo at home so then I what I needed to do is bring all these strangers together and there were different levels of what fascinated me about this process because I think a lot of my work was quite anthropological in the idea that I'm very interested in human behavior and

12:16 culture societies and one thing that I wanted to know is what happens when you bring lots of strangers together who that you know their only interest that they fundamentally share is that they enjoy being naked more than they enjoy being closed and then I was going back to that idea of vulnerability and how could I be more vulnerable and make these people feel you know safe and feel like I wasn't just kind of voyeuristically taking pictures of them so I got access to some clubs and then I sent out an email and it was like we are now going to Manchester Sun and our problem July the 12th the 17th and then were these strangers who come together and what was nice is because I had a diverse selection of people I had you

12:54 know the couple from home who kept ducks in their God and it makes me the guy that just about prison mix with you know I don't know this girl and this guy that been dating for 10 years and then he suddenly reveals he's a naturist he had all these different kind of stories come together and you've got to watch it unfold where these people would interact where you can't form a judgment on somebody due to their attire so you don't know what social class they come from what job they have all these different kind of human behaviors which is completely stripped away no judgments can be made and everyone

13:24 was instantly accepted so I carried on sort of going on you know to these trips and organizing these sites so I'm just gonna run three days so this Harry's can suck and it's actually a bat for a sport called mini 10 which is naturist only sport no idea why like there's note there's no actual reason it's just basically a mixture between tennis and ping pong with a bird-cage thing I don't know anything about that so some of the clubs like had a pub had a cinema screen you know had a little disco every night whereas some clubs were literally shared in the middle of Devon with no electricity and no water my Tesco 10 got some good good

14:38 innings that year I think one thing I also really like say this is mini thing one thing I really realized about this project was towards the end of it when I was at one of those camps in Devon and it was snowing and people were outside trying to barbecue naked I remember ringing that my friend Liz and just going I'm really not enjoying this and I love photography why am I not enjoying this and she was like that's because you care about it and I guess I realized that you're not going to enjoy all the projects that you do and there are going to be elements with it there so testing and really kind of push you to those boundaries but I was learning

15:18 while I was doing it so this is a really really wide edit of the project so it's just going to show you a few bits of like latest stuff because that was obviously quite a few years ago just to kind of tell you what's happened since then I guess since ybn my my interest still lie my nine minutes are you holding okay cool good good my interests still lie in photographing people and I'm all kind of like I'm still very passionate about portraiture so I just thought I'd run you through a few bits of recent work of projects in process this was just a recent commission from time and what's really nice it's a lot of my commercial work in editorial work is now really kind of blending in with my personal work and I

16:25 do keep the two very separate but it's really nice to be given some creative control and to collaborate with people on subjects that interest me so this was a story on the vulnerability of young men and this is a project that's in process at the moment I've been doing it for about three years and a lot of my projects require very very difficult access I mean not edmund Clark but pretty hard and this is a project I've been doing on Jewish Orthodox Hasidic women and so I've been working with a few different families within Stamford Hill and spending a very long time with each of them getting to know them and there's a combination at the moment between the shots so for me creating some very traditional but unknown

17:19 rituals and also traditional portraiture with their families it's just a sneak preview and I'm also doing a project at the moment on the idea of eternity and I'm doing a project called youth without age and life without death and this four follows a story in Romania but evolved from a folktale and it's about the idea of a prince exploring a land and finding a time where time does not exist and if you can live forever what you live for so my projects still involve a lot of research like for this projects at the moment I've just got some primary schoolchildren to interpret the story for me and draw some sketches and lots of like playing around like with film the other day we were kind of I'm shooting on a film that expired on the

18:10 year that I was born and kind of I mean we had a crazy day in the doctor in the other day where we decided that filming the microwave and set fire to everything so for me my projects are still about playing and exploring and so just to finish on I guess like my kind of mantra and the way that I work is all about the idea that what I love about photography the most is that you're never done you know it's kind of like a musical instrument you're constantly learning and there's constantly new things to kind of play with so Polaroid as well just exploring finding new mediums