Book Jockeying in San Sebastian!

Life is a continual learning experience and I'm looking forward to learning all about being a book jockey, with the master of book-jockeying, Julien Baron (shown below installing ICVL's brilliant Cage installation in Bristol earlier this year).

Ok, book-jockeying, what is it? It's this! Editing from multiple books to music! I will the learner and Julian Baron the master I think.

And I'll be talking about All Quiet on the Home Front as well, in San Sebastian this saturday as well as participating in a discussion with the great Laia Abril and Julian Baron and Jon Uriarte, so come along and say hello if you're in the area.

Stories From the Home Front: Gabriela Cendoya and The Fullness of Loss

The latest Stories from Home comes courtesy of Gabriela Cendoya-Bergareche  and is filled with absence. Find previous Stories  here, here, here and here

These two pictures are the closest to All quiet on the home front I could find… I'm not sure they are about fatherhood or motherhood though, maybe they are more about the lack of it. 

The first one is me in the woods in 1971 and it must have been taken by my aunt, who was THE photographer then. My mother died young and as far as I can remember, my father never touched a camera. 

The second one is from 75, a few months after my father’s death, and has been taken by my brother. It is about living in a rather isolated place, very close to the landscape, and not being able to talk too much about what we miss. 

I really love the way you do it in your book, showing this strong link of love with Isabel in the landscape, and your vulnerability and fear at the same time. Your book took me back in time, to remind me of the lost moments I miss today. 

Stories from the Home Front: Stefan Vanthuyne and the resistant picture

The latest Stories from Home comes courtesy of Stefan Vanthuyne and has an eerie familiarity to it. Find previous Stories  here, here and here.


Stefan Vanthuyne


“Are you done, dad?”. 

“Almost.”

He’s on a beach in France and he wants to climb the rocks and kick the waves.

He’s anxious and because of that he’s not settling into that state where he’s letting it all go and he’s just there; that moment of mere being.

He is ten now. I’ve photographed him many times. It used to be easy. He would be doing something – or nothing, I would see something, I would ask him to hold still.

For a second he would release everything, let his mind drift somewhere, and there it was: a swift picture.

Ask me why I photograph my children and I’ll most likely lose my way in trying to find a sufficient answer.

Of his photographs of his wife Edith, Emmet Gowin said that they established Edith as a person, and them as a couple.

“If you set out to make pictures about love, it can't be done”, Gowin said. “But you can make pictures, and you can be in love. In that way, people sense the authenticity of what you do.”

By photographing my sons, am I establishing them as such? Am I establishing myself as their father?

Do I find authentic proof of my fatherhood in the photographs of my children?

“Da-ad, are you done?!”

He’s too anxious now.

“Yes, I am. I’m done.”

He runs off.

I press the shutter.

If you would like to contribute to Stories from the Home Front (word and image), send me a message at colinpantall@yahoo.co.uk

Stories from the Home Front: Benedetta Casagrande - At six I told my father what to do

image from Benedetta Casagrande

After Emilie de Lauwers, we continue the series of responses to All Quiet on the Home Front with this insightful contribution from Benedetta Casagrande (see more of her work at Ardesia Projects)

I always used to tell my father off. When I was a child, I had a loud mouth and a strong sense of justice. I was inquisitive. I would ask him whether he ever went with a prostitute, and after I would ask him why didn’t he marry her. We would drive together to school, and I would reprove him for how he spoke back to mom. I was sweet and forgiving but I would not let anything go unnoticed. The most amazing thing about these memories is my father’s effort to listen to me. At six years old. Telling him what is best to do. More often than not he would thank me, and apply my wise advice.

When I was nine years old my oldest brother died in a motorcycle accident. Me and my father always were close, but the loss of my brother brought us closer - unlike my older brother and sister, I still required a great deal of looking after. My presence in my father’s life became a fundamental asset for his recovery from the loss of his firstborn. That special core of intimacy strengthened over the years - me and my father were (and still are, though differently) partners in crime. I know I can see through him - he knows it too.

Teenage years were tough. My boyfriend died in a car crash and I became increasingly anxious and afraid of death. Back then I used to live with my father, and he was growing old (he is from the class of 1944). He was an aging man dealing with a teenager in crisis - it must have been really hard for him. A few months later he had a brain hemorrhage, and I was sent to live with my aunt. He survived it, but my teenage self was persecuted by the images of him in the hospital room with two tubes coming out of his shaved head. He always had long, black hair, I had never seen him bald before.

How do you deal with the overtaking fear of loss? Death is so definitive… I have no answer to this question. All I know is that, becoming an adult, I began standing more steadily on my own legs. I know I will not be lost anymore. Me and my father have the most loving relationship and I am proud of how he is aging; he has a new family, picks up the nephews from school once a week, plays tennis three times a week and never spends one weekend at home. Him and his girlfriend are always travelling. Our bond has survived my growing up; I am an adult, but the characteristics of our relationship are still rooted in my childhood, in the times in which we were inseparable partners in crime.

Soft Fascination, Place Identity and All Quiet on the Home Front

I was reading about Soft Fascination, the idea that comes from The Experience of Nature by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan.

It's a very simple idea that leads on from the division of attention into directed and involuntary categories. Anything with a screen, with text, with images is directed. Anything where your brain is tuned into something organised and functional, that fits in some kind of grid, is directed. most 'relaxing' activities are directed. Relaxing activities drain us.

We live in a directed society and it's exhausting. We need relief from it. We live in a directed society and it's exhausting. We need relief from it. And that's where soft fascination comes in. It even sounds lovely. And that's because it is.

Soft Fascination provides relief from our exhausting lifestyles in the form of involuntary attention, the kind that you have when you walk in the woods wondering at the light flickering through the trees, when you lie down in a meadow and watch the clouds float by, when you doze on the beach listening to the sound of the waves. All of these involve attention but it doesn't fit within a grid, it has an inbuilt irregularity that stops it settling into the kind of regular pattern. The fractal patterns of light through trees, the movement of clouds, the sound of the waves all have an irregularity that is self-disruptive. In essence we can't concentrate on them. That is what makes them relaxing. It's the regularity that is exhausting.

So going out into nature, even the rough nature that you get around cities provides a restoration of energies, a rebuilding and firming up of the soul. That's what soft fascination does for you - it allows you to fall into yourself, to detach yourself from the gridded patterns of life. And the it takes place in environments that are restoring, so there is the idea of the Restorative Environment. 

I've written about forest-bathing before, which is something similar, but it's always rather lovely when you a new idea that corresponds to your own work, but you've never seen before.

All Quiet on the Home Front is all about that soft fascination, about finding some form of equilibrium in trees, water, flora, the elements. In a world where words, images, and the life-sapping parasitism of social media is competing for attention in a destruction manner, soft fascination is an antidote to the exhaustion. It is completely about the restorative environment both in the form Kaplan (and Burkeman) write about, but also in the sense of place attachment and place identity, the idea that a strong sense of place creates grounding points for memory and self that can act as external reset points throughout one's life; it's the idea of people being of this world rather than in control of this world in other words. The former potentially makes you happy, the latter most definitely does not. So




Anyway, this is what Burkeman says about it

Soft fascination has two crucial components. First, it’s effortless: you don’t need to “try to focus” on the wind in the trees, or a moor top blanketed in heather. Second, it’s partial: it absorbs some attention, but leaves some free for reflection, conversation or mind-wandering. The result is what the Kaplans called “cognitive quiet”, in which the muscle of effortful attention – the one you use to concentrate on work – gets to rest, but without the boredom you’d feel if you had nothing to focus on. This helps explain why nature’s benefits aren’t restricted to, say, trips to the Grand Canyon or Great Barrier Reef. Those places seize your whole attention, whereas your local park may seize just enough of it to let the rest of your mind relax.

Think about attention like this, and it becomes clear how irresponsibly we usually treat our own supply of it. “To concentrate on a task, you need to block out distractions,” as the design and technology expert Richard Coyne has written – and “once that blocking function gets worn down by fatigue, you are more likely to act on impulse, to shirk tasks that prove too challenging [or] to become irritable.” But all too often, we respond to concentration fatigue by trying to concentrate on something different: email, social media, TV – “things that are more engaging but less challenging”. No wonder that doesn’t work: it’s like taking a rest after lifting dumbbells by lifting different dumbbells. Nature, by contrast, lets us switch modes. To quote Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park, it “employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it; tranquillises it and yet enlivens it”.

There’s plenty of evidence for the soft fascination thesis. But for me, it’s personal experience that makes it ring so true. To listen to some proponents of mindfulness, you might think the best way to engage with nature is being totally immersed in the scenery. Yet anyone who loves hiking knows part of the pleasure is in pondering other matters as you walk, or in meandering conversations – rambling while rambling. Countless famous thinkers – Darwin, Thoreau, Wordsworth – swore by daily walks in nature. But they were still thinking as they walked.

And here are some formative thoughts from Kaplan on the idea of The Restorative Environment

The thrust of my argument can summarized in terms of three basic themes:

1. Increasing pressures lead to problems of mental fatigue.
2. Restorative experiences are an important means of reducing mental fatigue, and have a special connection to natural environments.
3. Natural environments, in providing these deeply needed restorative experiences,play an essential role in human functioning. 

These themes, in turn, lead to three groups of questions that 1 shall attempt to address:
1. The first set of questions concerns the pressures members of modem society face: Why are these pressures increasing? What impact do they have?

2. The second set concerns what Rachel Kaplan and I have come to call "restorative experiences," that is, experiences that help people recover from mental fatigue: What is the nature of these experiences? How do they achieve their substantial benefits? How does nature play a special role in providing such experiences?

3. Finally, what makes natural environments so important? What kinds of significant impacts can they have on the life of an individual? 

Stories From the Home Front: Emilie Lauwers: I did not know how to live without him

Following this post on All Quiet on the Home Front and emotional narratives, the blog is featuring submitted images and stories on their family life: Stories from the Home Front. This is from Emilie Lauwers who first told me her story when I was showing her the All Quiet dummy at the Gazebook Festival in Punta Secca.



Here's my story.

When I was twenty five, my brother died of health issues. He was twenty one. There is much to write about that moment that isn't relevant here. What matters, is that the days after, as the sun came up and went down and came up again, I was paralyzed. It took me some time to realize that sadness was not what paralyzed me. There was something else.

I did not know how to live without him.

It was not only the missing of a person I loved that scared me. What scared me, was that I didn't know who I was, apart from 'my brothers sister'.

I was 3 when he was born, so I had no memory of a life without him. We grew up together, and I built my identity upon his existence. His health issues were the clockwork of our family. I was a good girl, very responsible, very empathic, because that was the role I naturally took beside him. I was highly sensitive - I used to listen to his breathing all the time, and understood the unspoken sadness of my parents. I was his sidekick. I was funny when he lost courage. I defended him, lied for him, made his homework, carried him out of the sea when he was too tired to swim. Every single decision I took in my life until his death, whether it was the fact that I never traveled, a choice of study or an interest in certain men, was to be brought back to my brother in one or the other way. When I was 25, we said goodbye, and in that instant, everything I had come to be seemed to have lost purpose.

For a brief, very frightening moment, it occurred to me that I completely forgot to build a personality of my own.
An identity, independent of anyone else. 

It was a very brief moment, because one month later, I was pregnant.

Deus ex machina, my new function in life came from the skies.
I was no longer a sister. I was now a mom.
I was the kind of mother that completely ignores herself. Everything for the baby. It was the perfect alibi.

The situation made me connect even deeper with my parents. Becoming a parent always brings your own parents back to the stage. In my case, since my brother left, it was just the three of us anyway.

My parents are not random parents. My mom is the mom of everyone. The best way to describe her is that she owns a stock of postcards and she manages to send them to everyone on the planet, on the exact right moment. There will be a perfect postcard when someone is born or somebody dies, but also when someone graduates, moves house, gets married, gets divorced, gets chemo, swam without safety straps, saw a real squirrel, fears a big decision, loves chocolate, needs to pack for Italy. Anything. She does the same thing with books. I think if you'd take the books out of my parents place it would collapse. My mom offers books to people all the time: books with the perfect title, the perfect theme, or the perfect phrase in them. She's a big example to me, but as for perfectly timed postcards, for the time being I don't even manage to buy stamps in time.

You'll never guess, but my dad is the dad of everyone. I grew up with all his students nearby, the young artists and performers he was teaching. We'd have long dinners, with candle light and music and dozens of young people sitting around the table listening to my dad, eating the food my mom cooked for them. He was their master, and in many ways he still is mine. Many people knew him, and as I followed his footsteps into theatre, I was often introduced as 'the daughter of my dad'.

In my life, apart from 'my brothers sister' and 'the daughter of my dad', I occasionally was someone's employee, someone's colleague, someone's illustrator, someones designer or someone's scenographer. I was often someone's friend, someone's best friend, someone's neighbor. I also was someone's wife. I found the perfect man for a relationship in which elaborating one's own identity was not a topic.


Two years after my brother died and my daughter was born, my father had an accident. In a few hours time, he went from the charismatic director I was working with, to a body full of tubes in a hospital bed, so far gone in a coma he didn't even hear us speak. It took six months for him to recover, and in those six months my mother got breast cancer. All of a sudden, my immortal parents turned out to offer no certainty. Being 'just' their daughter wouldn't work forever. Being 'just' his brother never did the trick either.
Predictably, my husband had seen enough existential misery and our relationship didn't survive the worrisome times. We split up. I was no longer 'his wife'. The universe, just to make its point clear, also made sure that I got fired from my full time job. I was no longer someone's employee, someone's colleague, someone's designer. At that point in my life I was 29, and there were simply no more external factors to hold on to when it came to the simple question: 'who am I'?

There was one person left.

My child, then 3.

I realized I had to do things differently.

In order to be a parent, I had to be a person.

I had to identify myself.

It took me a few years to observe who I was and figure out what parts of my personality were essential to me, independent of others. You could say that I was 30 when I was born (again). I'm 33 now and I'm growing up, slow but steady. By the side of my daughter, who forces me to total integrity simply by calling me 'mom'. It's a beautiful journey, that I am enjoying with all my heart. If the story above seems heavy to you, don't worry, it has a happy ending and sharing it does no longer cause me any harm.

The emotional narratives. of All Quiet on the Home Front

When people talk or write about All Quiet on The Home Front, it is fascinating to see how the book touches different elements of people's experience of being a parent, being a child, of being outside.

All Quiet on the Home Front is about my experience of fatherhood and that loss of self I experienced when Isabel was born, and that recovery of self that happened as she grew up, as we got out of the house, as she established herself as a real person with real feelings, with a real life. And left me behind in the process. To me it's about the repeated cycle of birth and death as Isabel becomes who she is. My birth and my death. I'm the flip side to the images perhaps. It's about her, but it's about me. And the message is personal but it's also universal.

What is so unpredictable is the different parts the text and the images touch in people, and not just in predictable ways. I have talked about parental and maternal ambivalence before, the way in which you wish your child away, but I have found people approaching All Quiet from a different direction, from the inability to have children a kind of non-parental, non-ambivalence at the feeling of grief and loss this inability instils in a person - something that is not in the book at all, but somehow now is.

Or I have spoken to people who have beautifully talked about how motherhood was a coming into selfhood, not a loss of selfhood, a process compounded by earlier sacrifice and loss. And in terms of landscape, people have been both nostalgic about their childhoods, about the environments they found their life in, but there have also been stories of confinement and loss, of not being able to go outside, of a gradual locking away of the outside world, of watching while others are given free reign.

In Wired Japan, Kazuma Obara talks about the emotional tumult of fatherhood and the tears he shed on reading the book, in Photomonitor Jesse Alexander focusses on the escape from the domestic space, and the need to escape it, to get some relief from domestic claustrophobia.

What is also interesting about these responses and many more sent in by email, is how much they open up my interpretation of the book, how much I learn both about other people's experiences and my own.


In this extended piece in American Suburb X, Brad Feurhelm writes about how one's world view shifts when one has a child, and in particular how it shifts if you work in something creative. All Quiet on the Home Front is a kind of creative place holder then, something that consolidates a creative practice, that brings a parental ways of seeing and being into the work that I used to do. Which is not what I had in mind, but is completely the case. And now that I am working on other family material (my German Family Album - you can see some on Instagram) it seems to be a world in which I will be living for some while.

These are some snippets from Brad's piece, which is quite beautiful.


Nobody can tell you the effect of what having children does for or to you if you are in the creative arts....

When you are involved in making visual work, you have several different perimeters from which you construct images. Some people work in serial, some people work on one piece for a very long time, ruminating over its every detail and some people work completely automatically and simply produce. One thing that happens while becoming a parent in the first years is that within that strange world of fatigue and over-concern, you begin to appreciate the time that you can spend in your own head as it relates to creatively quite differently. Things open up and close down in equal measure... 

You grow to appreciate the time you have to yourself more often with all those strange hormones and anti-desires building up on your walk through the woods during the pram-pushing afternoon nap. At times, you find yourself trying desperately to imagine what life is like outside of the bountiful, but repetitive gestures of stacking those wooden blocks over and over or flipping through the same book 6,000 times to continue the ritual for stability that a child unknowingly forces on his or her parent. 

I think the great fear of becoming a parent when you are in the arts outside of the financial is the fear that you wont have time to create again or that when you return you might not be producing things at the same rate, speed or intensity of which you were before childbirth (the true B.C.)...

The most noticeable shift in becoming a parent in the arts is that the images or ideas that you thought was perhaps something of a grave nature or concern in your work, are found to be of less value than you thought...  The ideas that you had-a certain vigor or an urge or yes, very much a desire has slowed. What took me by surprise was that picking up a camera again had more to say about my newly developed circumstances than I had even considered and most of that lies within the intimate world around...

Colin Pantall’s “All Quiet on the Home Front” is a book I feel like I am living, but with a different protagonist in frame. I recognize his walks with Isabel, though I do not live in his country. I understand looking at his trees, the geological formations underneath their root structures and the places where fairly unthreatening water off the path collides with a child’s natural ability to notice it and demand inclusion within its swirling surface. I notice the last moments of summer and the oncoming spring when the energy that a child has to burn by process of growth is given ample green patch or dirt bike course to do so on as papa follows along with his broken camera never knowing if these images are his next book or simply “got some nice pics of Isabel today” totems... 

Colin’s work is about navigating this territory of new life alongside his daughter. It’s about creating fascination and also keeping the cogs of creativity oiled and running through watching his daughter grow up and himself grow older. Photography is many terrible things, but one thing it is great for is fascination. It harnesses the possibility for playing out in a different way giving the child a look into adult possibility, while also reminding the adult what it was like to look at the world with young and/or un-jaded eyes. 


Go here to read the whole article.

Because of the diverse nature of responses, and the stories that people want to tell, starting later this week I will be posting the stories and images people have been sending in as a response to All Quiet on the Front.


If you have a story and an image to show, do get in touch with me at colinpantall@yahoo.co.uk

The Bland Fundamentalists of Instagram

Instagram is a strange and alien tool that panders to our need to click and seek digital approval for our images. It is absurdly addictive and turns many of the people who use it (myself included - let's not pretend here) into like-seeking refresh junkies. You're on Instagram, that's what you do.

It's a conformist application with a form of censorship tht is infuriating and seemingly random, while at its heart is part of a corporate cultural imperialism with a spectral Anglo-American perspective on the world with weird and diverse religious undertones that pander to double standards and hypocrisy on a global scale. It's a weird kind of bland fundamentalism. Or something. I really don't know what it is.

The book Pics of it Didn't Happen  gives an overview of  one side of the argument, showing pictures that have been censored by Instagram, with an emphasis on  'how taboo very ordinary elements of female bodies, such as hair, fat and blood, have become.'

So there's that. And when little patches of blood are taboo, or bodies that are large, there is definitely something odd at work.

You get famous photographs that include nipples including these by Imogen Cunningham censored. But you can post works of art featuring nipples. So that's OK then.

If they are male nipples, then you are allowed to post them, hence the site Genderless Nipples.

So you can have pictures of men and boys showing nipples, but not of women or even children. This picture from All Quiet on the Home Front was censored by Instagram when I did Instagram takeovers on both the BJP and Photographic Museum of Humanity, possibly for that reason. However, it wasn't censored from my personal site, so the suggestion is that it's not an algorithm doing the job on this one. But I would venture that the image below is far more obscene than the image up top, not because of anything it shows but because of the view of childhood and family that it pressupposes. Not to mention the blatant sexism of covering up a girl's torso while allowing a boy's torso to be shown. This is a kind of Instagram hijab for 6-year-old girls, and with it comes a misogyny that is being spread globally at a speed and with a spread and depth that surpasses almost anything.

The image up top, which shows an image from my German Family Album (which I'm sharing on my Instagram account as I try to get to grips with it) was also censored after being online for a few days. I'm putting it back on with a big censored sign across it.

The image is from 1929, and is titled, in translation, The Judgement of Paris - which is a great title. It's funny but a bit odd. But because there is a penis showing, a 1929 penis, it is banned.

Ins its  'community standards', Instagram states that childhood nudity is questionable because 'even when this content is shared with good intentions, it could be used by others in unanticipated ways.' There are plenty of places in the world where this kind of childhood nudity is not questioned, yet here is Instagram questioning it on our behalf.

But it's the doublespeak of the language that Instagram uses that confounds me. I know we should all pretend social media is a community and that we're sharing, but every now and then let's call bullshit on the language of sharing. So first of all, posting a picture is not sharing and Instagram is not a community. Second of all the idea embedded in this text that predatory paedophiles are trawling through Instagram for pictures of semi-naked children is absurd.

Rather Instagram is imposing a particular view of women, of childhood, of sexuality on the world. It's a form of cultural imperialism that comes directly out of Anglo-American fear of the body, in particular the female body and the child's body. It's a worldview that is completely at odds with large parts of the world,  and is continuation of a war against the body, a shaming of the body (especially the female body), laced together with a commodification of the body and the family that has been going on in various forms for hundreds of years. Anne Higonnet's Pictures of Innocence and Philippe Aries' Centuries of Childhood are good starting points for this discussion, as are the religious right of all religions but I feel we are entering fresh territory now with the overlap of social media into these areas.

And it's massively important. How the body is represented affects how we see the world, how we behave, how our children behave. You can see in places how religious fanaticism (and it's not just one religion either) has entered the mainstream and transformed the way people dress, behave, and interact with each other.

You will get the same with Instagram and other social media. It communicates ideas of what is acceptable and what is not and people adhere to it very quickly. What appears on social media becomes part of a global way of thinking and seeing and doing. And it's not a community way of seeing, thinking and doing. It's a US corporate way of seeing, thinking and doing. It already affects what we post, for many it affects what they photograph, and that means it affects the way we behave, but on a huge, amplified scale.

And the best thing is I'm still on Instagram, because it's the ultimate tool of narcissism (or is that Facebook, or Blogger, or Snapchat...) and  that's how they get you.

Fear, Photography and ICVL

In Politicians want us to be fearful, John Bargh talks about how fear is used as a tool of control. It helps creates social, economic, racial and sexual injustice, both at a conscious and an unconscious level.

Bargh talks about how effective this unconscious communication is, that it infests our lives through images and ideas in popular culture and beyond. He talks about racism in US TV shows and how it is unconsciously manifested in even supposedly liberal broadcasts, and he talks about how gender bias is slammed on us from every corner. He talks about how the dominant culture message can overcome the personal message using an example of Asian-American girls who are convinced they can't do maths because they are girls.

“These Asian-American girls are not hearing at home that girls can’t do maths,” Bargh points out. “These are Harvard preschool kids; the parents are, like, tiger mums and dads. A lot of them brought the children into the study thinking that being in this Harvard study at age five would help their girl get into Harvard at age 18: that’s how motivated they are. They’re not the ones who are telling the girls they can’t do maths. It’s in the culture we soak up, without even knowing it.”


A lot of this negative bias comes from visual culture. You can see it everywhere from your toyshop to the children's department store, to the avatars selected for online games. It is absolutely all around us. I think we need to be aware of exactly how culture works, how images operate, and how they affect us at that subliminal level. We need to be our own adbusters in other words.

People in photography sometimes have the conceit that we are not affected by images, that we are immune to their persuasion. I think this is one of the most visually illiterate and most dangerous conceits that we can have.

I remember seeing Joachim Schmidt talk once and he had this great tagline that he's not going to make any more images until all the old ones are used up. I think there's something to be said for that in visual literacy. Until we start understanding the fundamentals of how images really work, on a basic everyday, functional level (which is not the same as the synthetic gallery/book/critical level), maybe we should ease up on creating a new languages. The danger being that you end up like Robert Capa, speaking lots of languages, all of them badly.

The other thing the article mentioned is that

'Conservatives have larger fear centres of the brain. They’re more concerned with physical safety than liberals. Once we feel afraid, our own fear can further distort our perception of actual danger. For example, research has found that when people become new parents of a tiny, vulnerable baby, they begin to believe their local crime rate is going up, even if it is falling. “That happened to me,” Bargh admits. “After my daughter was born, suddenly we felt that the neighbourhood was getting so dangerous that we had to leave.”'

I can empathise with that idea. There's a section in my book All Quiet on the Home Front dealing with that. I saw death all around. First of all the domestic space became a source of danger, so much so that I dreamt about death. And then as your child's environment widens, the rest of the world becomes a source of danger; the supermarket, the park, the streets. And people become a danger.

So part of being a parent is managing that danger, both for yourself and for your child. It's a kind of slow exposure to danger - physical danger in the form of the natural world, but also the threats posed by the kind of negative bias that Bargh mentions above. Being a parent, to a girl in particular, is about making your child visually literate, making the institutionalised misogyny of the visual world apparent to them.

Linked to that is the issue of managing fear and understanding fear. The point Bargh makes about fear relates to a low level background hum of fear, an anxiety almost. Here in the UK, we live in an age of anxiety. That's what this millenium is, the Age of Anxiety. And it's numbing and soul destroying.

I have often wondered on this blog if photography doesn't live in a perpetual age of anxiety. There is a sense of fear in photography, and even when people like myself say we shouldn't live in fear, there seems to be an underlying tone that is judgemental and limiting.

The challenge is how to recognise that fear and make work without fear. There are all kinds of fear; fear of ridicule, fear of not being cool, fear of being called unethical, fear of being too emotional, fear of being scolded. The last one is a big one. Photography can be very scoldy.

Because of all these fears you have a state where people are afraid to make work, are limited in what they can  make. You can feel it all the time, you can see it all the time in people shifting away from their vision, their idea of what really matters to put themselves in line with the world-view of their photographer mentors and peers.

 My blog is 10 years old this week and I'll be doing a random best-of list later in the week, but there is one thing I will mention here instead because it connects and it fits better here.

                           
                            Image from The Great Bazaar by Alejandro Acin

It's meeting Alejandro Acin,  publishing my book All Quiet on the Home Front and hanging out with the super-talented people connected to IC Visual Labs at their HQ and othe venues in Bristol. All Quiet on the Home Front is quite an emotional book (at Gazebook Sicily in September I had a group of Italian friends expressing disbelief that an Englishman with a German mother could make such a book) and in a strange way did require an overcoming of fear.

And that is what IC Visual Labs is all about. Every time I go there, I see people who are all being fearless in some way, and making fantastic work because of it. When they make their work, they simply don't care about what other people say and that is what makes their work so good. It's not easy. There is a huge amount of pressure on them to do things in a certain way, to limit the political or the personal or the emotional or the creative elements. But in that environment at IC Visual Labs, there is a certain freedom of creative thought and freedom of creative expression, and a pleasure in that freedom, that you do not get easily elsewhere. And that is why Mr Acin and everybody involved in IC Visual Labs, you're top of my 10 years of the blog best-of list, the rest of which is to come on Thursday.

Buy All Quiet on the Home Front here.

All Quiet on the Home Front is almost sold out. You can buy the last copies here.


It is also available now at the wonderful Tipi Bookshop in Belgium, at Photobookstore in the UK, at Ffoyles in London, at Kominek Books in Berlin, at L'Ascenseur Vegetal in France, at Perimeter Books in Australia at Micamera Bookstore in Milan, and the Anzenberger Gallery Bookshop in Vienna.

You can also order it from Photo Eye in the USA.

Thanks for the Memories

Thank you to Diane Smyth for a lovely piece on All Quiet on the Home Front in BJP online

“Nothing that can prepare you for the shock of becoming a parent; you kind of lose yourself,” he says. “It drives you insane. But then you gain a new identity, only for that  to die too, when you realise they have their own lives to lead. Then you have to have another rebirth. I don’t think it’s always that comfortable. Sometimes you wish things were different. You wish your children away at times. You always wish them back.”

The book is part of a group of family-based works Pantall is working on, which include a German family album from the 1930s (Pantall’s mother is German), and Sofa Portraits, which pictures Isabel watching television on the same coffee-coloured settee, variously wide-eyed and somnolent.

In the piece it mentions the place I used to work at. Actually, it's officially my last day tomorrow, so I'll take this opportunity to thank everybody I worked with there, but in particular the students. I'll really miss you. You were an inspiration. Keep on making noise, get yours and others voices heard and keep on making great images. I'll look forward to seeing you in the outside world. And thank you for the summer leaving card. It makes a difference.