Colin Pantall: Becoming a Father, All Quiet on the Home Front

“When Isabel was a baby I had a dream. In the dream it was Christmas. We lived above a pub in a single room crammed with old pub furniture. In one corner was a Christmas tree. It had real candles which were balanced on the tree’s branches. It had electric lights which were plugged into the socket using bare, sparking wires. And instead of sitting in a bowl of water, it sat in a bowl of acid. That sense of morbidity, claustrophobia, and anxiety is at the heart of  All Quiet on the Home Front. It is a reflection of the fears that sat deep within me all when I became a parent; the fear of my daughter’s death, my own death, and my built-in obsolescence and redundancy as a parent. To escape this claustrophobia, I took Isabel outside into the landscapes around our home in Bath. The woods of Brown’s Folly, growing out of the contours of an old stone mine, the scrappy BMX track built on the banks of the River Avon, and the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Solsbury Hill became our playground, places where we escaped the confines of a stultified life lived between four walls. These are the landscapes where both Isabel and I found ourselves and this book tells that story. It’s a series of landscapes, it’s the story of becoming a child and becoming a father. It’s the story of growing up and growing old and leaving behind everything that has come before. It’s a self-portrait.”

This work by Colin Pantall is a beautiful collection of images, that when initially looking at appear to contain an idea depiction of family life in nature. While there are not smiling faces, at first glance the images of the young girl in the fields of flowers seem idyllic, a perfect place to raise a child in the UK countryside. However upon looking at the images further the reason behind the work starts to come through. There is something uneasy about them, the anxiety that Pantall refers to has been transferred onto these photographs. While Pantall states that going to the country side was to escape this feeling of claustrophobia that he got after having a dream, the isolation in the images still contains a feeling of concern and worry. The grass and flowers in the fields almost working as if they were a blanket, cushioning Pantall’s daughter from the outside world, but not out of care, out of fear.

These images are very beautiful, and I feel like the way in which they have built an uneasy and unsettled atmosphere is something that I would like to think about doing in my own work. I feel as though this type of atmosphere created is very much down to the natural feelings of the photographer and the subjects. Therefore, in my own work, I am curious as to what natural feeling my images will end up making, as I am shooting with both my older brothers, and I am unsure of the relationship dynamic at this point. I feel that I would aim to achieve this same feeling of uneasiness and discomfort in my work to emphasis the difficulties in our relationship.