Visualising Sports with Panashe Gwyneth
Exploring the intersections between sports, design and fashion, Panashe Gwyneth photographs the unseen communities that shape the movement. She speaks to Yeliz about how her creative practice emerged and how she uses research to create links.
Interview by Yeliz Zaifoglu | 12.03.25
Um, hi, what's your name?
My name is Panashe Gwyneth and I am a creative/designer, and I'm happy to be here.
My first question is a very simple one, tell us about yourself. How did you get into what you do?
Okay, cool. So, I started shooting when I was quite young. My dad was a photographer beforehand, so he always had cameras and stuff on deck. I started shooting like, properly when I was at 16, because I decided to, like, study photography at college. And that was kind of when I started navigating my style. I started off quite editorial and wanted everything to be clean and I was very into the whole magazine look. But as time went, I think my style started to change, because I preferred to capture, like, sports and movement.
I still loved fashion, so I kind of just found that crossover between the two and from like last year, I kind started focusing on sports fashion, so still keeping the editorial type look, but also kind of looking at shooting sports inspired collaborations, a little bit of street photography in there as well. And yeah, that's where I'm at. That's what I'm doing.
How does sports as a culture like not only affect your work, but you as a person and as a creative?
I moved out and literally a couple months into moving out, I got really ill and so it meant I couldn't really do things like I used to and so I spent a lot of time, like, just like scrolling and being like “I wish I could do all of this stuff”. And then I kind of were just reminiscing on, like, my times in sports, I played football and netball when I was younger. I hated PE but I loved sports. I was always watching swimming and the Olympics but it was always quite male dominated. It wasn't really until 2022/2023 that I started to see the impact of women in sports and that really inspired me. I had my favorite female football players and stuff and wanted to see what that looked like beyond football.
I spent so much time just watching basketball, skateboarding, flipping tennis, just everything. And as I'm watching I'm realizing that a lot of these sports all had like individual styles, but like nowadays it just felt more prominent. I was also just looking at the commercial connections, so who their sponsors were, and making those aesthetic connections. I think I've always been inspired by sports, design and fashion. I just didn't know it up until I kind of started making those connections. And then just realizing how much the girls are like piloting that as well was like, so cool.
But also, this is a thing for the POC girlies. We are not being told about these sides of sports, and we are not being told about these creative sides to it. It isn't much of a conversation of how somebody gets to a point of doing that specific career in sports, or how they manage to get that kind of connection in sports or fashion and stuff.
"We are not being told about these sides of sports, and we are not being told about these creative sides to it. It isn't much of a conversation of how somebody gets to a point of doing that specific career in sports, or how they manage to get that kind of connection in sports or fashion and stuff."
I get that so when you must now deal with something that debilitates you in a certain way or you feel debilitated by it and you see actions you want to do but cant it can be really uninspiring because you just want to do that. But then you realise time will move and you can still do those things, maybe not in the same capacity that you thought you could, but in another capacity that's equally fulfilling, is what I've kind of taken from that.
Would you like to go into the Black Blueprint?
Yeah. Oh, wow, yeah. So the Black Blueprint was something that I came up during my A levels. I grew up in West Sussex and London, and West Sussex is very white, so I didn't have like, gateways into creativity as a black kid. And it was literally during the exam time, I was like “Oh, my God, I want to highlight black voices”. Like I just want to highlight more black creators, more black voices.
I ran it with another person. His name is Josh, and we put our heads together during, like, the peak of our A levels, and we just planned the shoot day. And we were like, “We don't know who we want to shoot. Let's put an outreach out” And we had like 70 people apply, so we narrowed it down and we went to a massive basketball court. We just said, “Everybody turn up at this basketball court we're going to do a shoot.” And yeah, that's the vibe. We captured them. They told us what they do. Like, they were all creatives, and some of them were creatives in sports, which even at the time, hadn't even woken up to that year. And so, the first year was a success, and then the next year we ran it again. We got even more applicants. But this year we wanted to interview the people. We interviewed them, and they told us about what inspires them and what they want to see more, and what it means to be a Black Blueprint. It was literally a spur in the moment, thing that actually ended up being requested every year. We didn't do it last year because I was unwell, but we are rebooting it this year, which I'm really excited about. I can't wait for that. I'm really, really, really, really excited about that. But yeah, it was literally just for black, young, black creative voices to have a platform to be like “Hey, this is what I do, this is why I love doing it.”
Doing a shoot like that is so amazing!! And so many people too, how did you even deal?
I didn't even know what I was doing at that point. I'll be real, like, I didn't have a clue about shoot etiquette at that point. I just literally made a group chat. We didn't even know whether we were allowed to shoot in there, but we didn't care! We just turned up, brought a speaker, and we did it. It was amazing.
You also have a page called The Archival Daughter! That's still a relatively new page. What are the goals? What do you want that page to grow into? Essentially, what is it about?
So, the Archival daughter essentially came from my love for research. So, like I said, because I was unwell for so long, I spent so much time rethinking what it would look like when I go back to work. And I realized that I really love research, and I really love finding images and words that I guess are considered as archives of information. But I realized that I really, really, really loved that sports and design crossover. There will be stuff about Nike, Skateboarding, football, scans from photobooks and collages I plan on making. But also exploring stuff like architecture, accessories, spatial design, and just showing the influences of where sports and design crossover. So it’s in its really early stages but I’m so excited.
And then my last question is, what would you donate to the Museum of Youth Culture?
Oh, that is a really good question. Okay, if there was one thing that I could donate I actually think it would be my first camera. I think I would donate that and be like, this is where it started like, that's where everything started from.
You can follow Panashe on Instagram here.
