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Gomma Photography Grant 2025
The Journey home from school
Photographer
Laura Pannack
The Journey home from school
14 Feb, 2026
The Honorable Mention also goes to Laura Pannack, whose work The Journey Home from School explores the fragile passage between childhood and adolescence in the Cape Flats of Cape Town — a place where the simple act of walking home from school can become a daily negotiation with fear, uncertainty, and inherited violence.
Working in close collaboration with young people from local community organisations, Pannack expands documentary beyond observation. Cameras circulate between participants, and the process incorporates drawing, collage, and cyanotypes, transforming the work into a shared act of storytelling.
The resulting images reveal a generation navigating complex realities with humour, resilience, and courage. Lo-fi photographic processes and hand-made gestures — smudges, blurs, fingerprints — become part of the visual language, echoing the immediacy and instability of the environment in which these stories unfold.
Anchored in the Cape Flats yet resonating far beyond it, the project reminds us that the journey home from school — a universal childhood ritual — can also be a tightrope walk through landscapes shaped by history, inequality, and survival.
About the photographer
Laura Pannack
Laura Pannack is a London-based photographic artist (b. 1985). Renowned for her portraiture and socially engaged documentary work, she explores the complex relationship between photographer and sitter. Many of her projects focus on youth and the passage of time, often working closely with adolescents while blending her interest in psychology with collaborative approaches involving practitioners and academics.Her work has been widely exhibited and published internationally, including at the National Portrait Gallery, the Houses of Parliament, Somerset House, and the Royal Festival Hall in London.Over the past seventeen years her work has received significant recognition and numerous awards, including the John Kobal Award, the Vic Odden Award, World Press Photo Awards, the Julia Margaret Cameron Award, the Sony World Photography Awards, the HSBC Prix de la Photographie, and the Camera Clara Prize.Rooted in shared experience, Pannack uses the camera as a bridge, approaching her subjects with curiosity, openness, and a commitment to genuine connection. Driven by research-led, self-initiated projects, her long-term bodies of work evolve organically, allowing narratives to emerge over time. Working predominantly with analogue film, she embraces unpredictability, welcoming chance and intuition into her creative process.As the artist explains:“The work aims to tell and inspire stories. My aim is to connect and emotionally engage with a viewer. I want you to look at my images and see your own story too.”
