South African schoolchildren's daily journey wins British photographer a new award

A British photographer has won a new award for a body of work about South African children getting to school, and the book that carries it is now on sale.

As The Guardian reported on 2 November, Laura Pannack has been named the winner of the inaugural Tom Stoddart Award for Excellence 2025 for Crossings, a long-form documentary project that follows young people on the journey to and from school and looks at the physical and psychological difficulty of that trip. The award is a collaboration between Gost Books and the Ian Parry Photojournalism Grant, and it is aimed at photographers doing sustained documentary work rather than single images.

The Guardian’s picture gallery shows what the project contains: a bus stop, two students embracing on the way to school, a child named Ethan waiting at the stop, drawings turned into cyanotypes, a participant named Moesheida, a section titled “the girls who can’t walk to school”, a 35mm frame made by a participant, and portraits of children including Ronaldo with her sister Ana, Diego and Zahra, Wacca, and Diego, Kieran and Abdullah, and Wacca, Kamiela and Lizanne. Some of the work was made by the young people themselves.

The Guardian’s summary notes that South Africa has one of the world’s highest levels of social inequality and a rapidly growing youth population. Both facts shape what the photographs are about. The trip to school is where inequality shows up in a child’s day before the first lesson does: in the distance covered, the transport available, the time it takes and the safety of the route.

That is the ordinary thing the pictures are asking a South African reader to look at again. A child who leaves home at a set hour and arrives at a school gate is doing something most of the country recognises, and the project treats it as worth a long documentary record rather than a passing frame.

Crossings by Laura Pannack is available now.