Colin Pantall is a photographer, writer, and educator based in England. And as a British citizen, he’s starting to live the consequences of Brexit firsthand.
Inspired by the British countryside, Colin Pantall realized a series of images that encapsulate Brexit both in terms of a romanticized but harassed landscape – a vision of Britain's past, its sordid present, and its doomed future.
Read our Q&A with Colin Pantall to learn more.
How did the idea of Brexit Pictures come about? And when did you say yourself “Ok let’s make a book out of it”?
The idea started in 2019 when the Brexit meaningful votes in the UK were in full force. It was a stress-filled time when watching parliament on TV suddenly became a national pastime. It was a drama filled with liars, cheats, charlatans, and an incipient xenophobia.
I have an allotment in the constituency of Jacob Rees-Mogg. He’s one of the cheerleaders for Brexit, a rather ill-fitting character who thinks he’s Saville Row but is more H&M (google his name and suit), the kind of character Dickens wrote out of his novels for being too compromised by his own venality. He was on the news everywhere, and this inspired me to start doing very sarcastic posts on my Instagram account as a response using everyday images from around the allotment that connected loosely to the emotions involved in Brexit and the places they both came from and would lead to.
Then the nostalgia, the fantasy, the idealised sense of an English history and identity started linking into the images, the landscapes in particular. Brexit Pictures is essentially a book of landscape pictures, of a landscape that is enclosed, fenced, controlled, poisoned, divided, and still romanticised because it’s all we have got.
There was this threadbare scarecrow of Theresa May that appeared in the allotment during the election of 2017. It decayed over a matter of weeks and I photographed it constantly. That gave me the idea of making a publication, but I delayed until quite late.
At the beginning of last year, I wrote about Mark Duffy, who used to be the Houses of Parliament photographer until he was fired for misconduct (possibly the only person fired in parliament because of Brexit). His in-house pictures of the Brexit negotiations had appeared in newspapers around the world, but he got fired from his job, mounted a fabulous exhibition, and got raided by police for his troubles. I loved the humour he used despite the harassment, doubt, and pain he had been put through. There was also an edge to his work, and that made me realise how little photography there was that reflected the psychotic dysfunction of the Brexit process. So late September I decided to make Brexit Pictures. It was then that I got in touch with a designer, Megan Gallacher, and we started the design process a couple of months later in November. The last minute, haphazard nature of the whole process fits the nature of Brexit.
Can you tell me more about the process of choosing the pictures? I’ve seen the spreads with the IG surveys and I’m curious to know more. What is a "Brexit Picture"?
Ha ha. Good question. I was following the idea of the idealised English landscape and the way it is undermined by its own reality. I see it every day in the allotments that are near my home (that’s where the Theresa May scarecrow comes from), in the fenced off, divided, deforested hills I walk in most days.
The images in the body of the publication are landscape-based and touch on those ideas of our fantasy British lives, a compromised land and the death, waste, and lack of vision that accompanies it. In the pictures, there are rows of hollyhocks and poppies, there is a gibbet of moles (poisoned and hung on a fence on display), the fringes of a grouse moor, a path that disappears into the English Channel and startled sheep (the field full of sheep will become a rarity in future years. That’s a shame. I like sheep). So that layering of an idealised fantasy idea of Britain mixed with a sardonic reality is what makes a Brexit picture.
The IG vote pictures are a nod to the whole Brexit procedure; it’s a procedure filled with false promises, false turns, random votes, complete drama, and a certain amnesia. The IG vote pictures mirror that; the votes have no integrity, are not transparent, and nobody really knows what they were voting for anyway. And as with Brexit, the powers that be (me and Megan) could just ignore the votes if we wanted. And we wanted.
There’s also humour in there, a strangeness of custom in there, a sense of resistance, a hint of violence and a touch of insanity. They all go together. That’s what it means to be British. Being British is not entirely good, it’s not entirely bad, it’s rather short-sighted, it’s a little bit traumatised, a little bit bruised, and it’s ridden by multiple neuroses that it is in denial about. We should see a therapist but, alas, that’s a bit too non-British for us, so we’ll stiffen our lips and make do.
You’re also a writer yet there isn't much text in the book. Why?
Brexit is not something that is easy to write about. It’s not something based on reason, logic, or benefits, it’s a shape-shifting emotional event that is based on English exceptionalism, victimhood, and political failures. I get a little bit mad when I write about it.
The pictures fit into the Brexit framework better than words could ever do. They preserve the neurotic ambiguities of it all without the destructive anger. They are also strangely funny in a dark way. There’s a pleasure in looking at them, and there was a pleasure in the making of them. I really enjoyed the process of making, marketing and selling the publication with the designer. It was great fun and was a kind of vaccination against Brexit for a couple of months. Words wouldn’t have been so much fun or create such a looseness of associations that create their own parallel universe.
What does Brexit mean to you?
My mother’s German, my father is English, my wife’s parents were Yugoslav refugees till they were admitted to Canada in 1947 so I have a sympathy and understanding for the mixing and diversity that European integration has helped. I see it in my family, my friends, in my neighbourhood, in my work.
Brexit shuts that down. On a very selfish level it stops me, my wife, my daughter, from being able to live, work, study, and travel freely and with ease in 27 countries.
As an artist and writer, but also as an individual in your everyday life, how will Brexit change your life?
For sure it will change my life. I sent out copies of Brexit Pictures before Christmas deliberately to avoid the complications Brexit would bring. The day after I sent my final copies, post to Europe was stopped due to the new Covid variant, but with an undercurrent of Brexit. Those problems are now compounded with new regulations on sending packages overseas or receiving them from overseas. We are becoming a real island again with all of the insularity that suggests.
In terms of living or working or travelling in Europe, in terms of the overseas students I teach, things have suddenly become more complicated. The death in the UK of the Erasmus programme has already had a major effect and I know people who won’t be studying in the UK because of Brexit. People I know have moved away from the UK, because of the latent hostility revealed by Brexit among other things. It’s a slow burn though and the complications will develop as the years progress.
At the same time, I’ve started the year with new work in Italy and Belgium so that makes me happy. If we are lucky and open and generous, let’s hope the impact is not as great as my worst fears has me imagine.
And how, in your opinion, will it change the lives of people who may not even be aware of it?
In the UK, there will be major problems, costs, and bureaucracies for Europeans who are settled here already. It is already incredibly disruptive, especially for more marginalised European citizens.
For Britons, living and working in Europe will become increasingly more difficult (we are seeing this already with Britons sent back from Spain and the Netherlands for not having the correct paperwork). Travel will be restricted in small but significant ways. Food imports and exports will be affected (this is already happening with deliveries to Northern Ireland and further afield sent back due to incorrect documentation), UK farming will be hugely affected in multiple ways we don’t know of yet, and the flipside of all this is the deregulation that is in the pipelines. That’s when the employment, environment and healthcare issues start kicking in. It’s a few years down the line, but it’s coming.
What is the thing that scares you the most about Brexit?
That deregulation is what is really scary. The EU has never been perfect but being in, rather than out, expanded our world and the flaws of our current leaders far outweigh the flaws of the EU. We are essentially a Conservative-voting nation (I’ve never voted for them mind and never would) which is happy to elect leaders who would sell your grandmother for a nice plate of beef wellington. A few weeks ago the prime-minister promised that following the deal, “the UK won’t immediately send children up chimneys or pour raw sewage all over its beaches”. The “immediately” is the killer there.
The idea behind Brexit is that we can regain our sovereignty and all fly spitfires again. Unfortunately, above and beyond this imaginary reliving of the Battle of Britain, neoliberal Conservatism will kick in, and there will be a money grab with a selling of sovereignty in terms of the regulation of food, employment, environment, housing, energy, healthcare.
I fear for us becoming a poundshop America – we’re halfway there already - imagine the invasion of Congress but with English people with worse teeth and skin – it’s an even less pretty sight. And with that fear comes a fear of the mentality that will accompany that state – a nation so backward, inward-looking, and stupid that we begin to circle in on our own mythologies to become a nation of nationalist troglodytes. It will be MEGA in action – Make England Great Again (Scotland, and possibly Wales and Northern Ireland will leave). Which means, and this is my greatest fear. we’ll never have a non-Conservative government again. Airstrip One here we come.
What did it mean to you to be part of Europe? And what about now?
We’re a little island now. Before it felt kind of grown up to be part of Europe. I could fantasise about moving somewhere hot with great food (which is dumb romanticisation for starters). I could go to festivals like Gazebook Sicily, or Paris Photo, and be part of it as a European.
I could see the diversity of people who had come to Britain and enriched it in multiple ways. They made it a better, more open-minded, more dynamic place. Food, culture, language, customs adapted and changed very visibly. There was an openness in the arts, in music, in photography, in fashion and a certain humbleness in recognising that other places did things far better than we did, that you could learn from them. With Brexit that sense of belonging is very quickly disappearing, that sense of shared histories and values is also disappearing. Already musicians, actors, artists, and students are finding barriers to working in Europe. You can feel that separation settling in, and with it comes a nationalist stupidity.