Laura Pannack first went to Romania in 2012; she’d been living in a shared house in London and, after the death of a friend, needed to step out of the pace of that life, find a place where time might seem less fleeting. Over the following years she spent extended periods in remote Romanian villages, taking pictures. A translator she was working with had mentioned to her a particular local folktale called Youth Without Age and Life Without Death; the story, about a prince who goes in search of a land where time stands still, gave her the idea for a book of photographs.
In that book, published this month, Pannack has created strange and haunting pictures with some of the villagers she met and lived among to illustrate ideas from that story. This photograph arises from a particular line: “then the sisters made their guest and his hosts known to all the wild beasts”. It happened, Pannack explained to me, that she had been walking along a lane in one village one morning when she met three sisters and started chatting about her project. They entered into the spirit of the story “100%” she says, and helped her make this picture.
Working on these images, inhabiting these small daily adventures, helped Pannack reframe her “always-existing anxiety that time is running out”. In the folktale, when the prince eventually finds the land where time stops, he discovers all the people he loves have died; “the moral,” she says “is that we should not seek infinite time, but spend the time we have with people we love”. Pannack is working on a “second chapter” of the project, this time following the threads of certain German folktales into the forests of north-eastern Germany.
Youth Without Age and Life Without Death is published by Guest Editions (£45)
