Like Multistory, Pannack clearly feels a responsibility towards her subjects in her wish to depict them truthfully, and with openness. “I’m forming a dynamic,” she explains. “Whenever I was shooting or I was hanging out with them, there’s no judgement. I’m not giving them a voice, and I’m not speaking for them; I’m just taking pictures.”
At the end of the project, the photographs were collected in a magazine alongside Pannack’s diary entries, and set alongside photographs and writing from the kids themselves, created during workshops. The magazine is, in this way, a collaboration, situating Pannack’s voice alongside theirs; both subjects and photographer have come together to create a portrait of this particular place at this particular time.
“I really liked them. I think they’re great kids,” she tells me. “They were quite respectful, they were quite curious.” Her keenness to describe these warm experiences is understandable given the impression of toughness created by some of the images. It’s not so much that the kids are smoking, but the worldly way they hold their cigarettes; the way a young boy leans over his bike handlebars with a grubby face and a grim look in his eye.
In one scene, a group of kids and teenagers are holding party balloons, while the littlest one is blowing up a condom. Pannack’s ability to access and record moments such as these, though, speaks to the strength of the relationships with her subjects in the first place; the fact that she was not permanently connected with an organisation allowed her to gain an uncommon level of trust. “Because I’m not in a position of authority, I’m not
a threat,” she notes. “I genuinely got along with them.”
At the end of the project, Multistory put on a “Fun Day at the Tibby”, with a barbecue, a football match, games, and a screening of the images, as well as distributing the magazines. “We loved seeing Charlie’s face light up as she opened the zine and realised her piece of writing had been selected, and then showed all her friends,” describes Becky Sexton, the project manager from Multistory who produced the project. For many attendees, this would have been their first experience interacting or collaborating with an artist. The project, in its rawness of approach at the same time as in its faithful depiction of the friendships on The Cracker, is a source of pride.