All Quiet on the Home Front: On the Way to Paris!

All Quiet on the Home Front arrived at the offices of ICVL on Tuesday so it's been a busy time of unpacking, signing and packing in preparation for the launch in Paris on Saturday (at 6pm on the Polycopies boat.

Alex and I are delighted with the book. It looks and feels and smells great, the culmination of a long, long process, and the beginning of another. All Quiet is the first part in a quartet of works that look at domestic life and the family space from  domestic (12 Grosvenor Place) , physcial (Sofa Portraits), environmental (All Quiet on the Home Front)l and historical (My German Family Album) points of view.

All Quiet on the Home Front is the environmental point of view. It's also my point of view, the story of how I became a father, how I developed my relationship with Isabel through the landscape. I've been telling the story of the ideas behind the book both on the BJP instagram account (@bjp1854) and on this blog.

So you can read about paternal ambivalence, the gendering of the landscape and representation of girls in the landscape, space, place and landscape, fatherhood, narrative, domestic spaces, and more besides.

We are driving down to Paris tomorrow and will be launching the book at the Tipi stand on the Polycopies boat at 6pm on Saturday 11th November. I'll sign your book for you and draw a picture too if you like!  I'm really looking forward to saying hello to people and getting the book out into the big, wide world at last.

If you're not going to Paris, you can buy a copy here. There are still a few special editions left, which come complete with the handmade, lino-printed boxes and a limited edition print. They are gorgeous.

See you in Paris!

I coulda been a contender! Instagram takeover at the BJP

The long march of glorious self-promotion continues for a little longer as I do an instagram takeover at the BJP with words of wisdom to go with the pictures. You can go here to see more images. Most are from All Quiet on the Home but there are a few others as well. 

Visit @bjp1854 here.

And my instagram account, @colin_pantall is here.


The first time I showed Sofa Portraits they got mixed reactions. Many people, recognised the escapism, the dreaminess and found it connected to their own lives, their childhoods, their sense of self. 

But Isabel watched television when she was tired, when she came home from school, when she was sick. Sometimes she fell asleep in front of the television.

People with children see sickness, fatigue and physicality on a daily basis. It's part of life. But they don’t see it so much in photographs. It’s not what we are supposed to photographed. A family might have the most abusive father or neglectful mother but you’ll never see that in a family album. We construct a different image, we tell a different story.

So there were people who saw the old sofa, the exhaustion, the bruises on Isabel’s legs as something more sinister. 
See three pictures of a smiling child and that becomes the story. It’s a happy child. See three pictures of a sick or tired child and that becomes a different story.

That’s the terror and the magic of photography. We project our own meanings onto images and fabricate narratives that freeze the image into an imaginary world that might have nothing to do with the one where the image was made. 
People only need to see three images and they will make up their own story. And we all do it. All the time! Everybody. It’s the nature of how we see the world, it’s the nature of photography.

But that’s a beautiful thing. Because it means we can determine which way the story goes. We can create new stories and take them beyond the singularity of the image. Sofa Portraits is a story. And so is All Quiet on the Home Front. 

When Isabel was tired, when she came home from school or being outside she would collapse in front of the television for an hour on the battered sofa we had in our living room. This became her place to wind down and relax.

I photographed her watching TV, escaping into her imaginary world. Virginia Woolf wrote that a woman needs a room of her own – a place to think, write and create words. In the same way, a child needs a room of her own, or at least a place where she can be free to be who she wants to be, where her day isn’t regulated away into a series of lessons and organized activity.

In a small way, the sofa Isabel watched television from was an escape from all this. It was a room of her own, the place where she could wear what she wanted, lie and stretch and sit with comfort her only thought.

This was where I felt most liberated. I was away from the constricted domestic environment of both the flat and the park. The energy found a new direction and the sounds, the smells and the sights of the places we visited relaxed us both.

The Japanese have this concept of ‘shinrin-yoku’ or forest-bathing. It’s the idea that the patterns of the light shining through the leaves of the trees are relaxing; they wash away the stresses of a screen-based life. The scent of the forest does the same, and so does the dirt in the ground.

Taken together it’s a massive life boost where you heart is slowed, your immune system boosted and your brain rested. 
We didn’t know it, but all that time we spent outside we spent forest-bathing. 

I spent a lot of time with Isabel, playing with her in the flat where we lived. She was a high energy child and used the flat as a playground. 

When Katherine was working, I took over childcare duties and played with her. Her favourite game was making stories up with Playmobil figures or 'dollshouse people' as we called them. 

It drove me mad so to keep myself interested I re-enacted scenes from history and film; The Cultural Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Dracula or the Exorcist. 

To this day, Isabel swears I’ve ruined the endings of classic films because of the dollshouse people games. But she's got a great sense off history.

Empathy in Photography

I'm looking forward to giving a talk on my work together with Olivia Arthur of Magnum Photos and Jess Crombie of Save the Children in London on December 8th.

The talk will focus on the idea of empathy (it's running in connection with a retrospective of David Chim Seymour's most beautiful, sad and joyful work on children in post-war Europe at the Magnum Print Room in London. It really is tragic work and fitting that Chim was the first photographer for the nascent Unicer). I'll be talking about my work and then be in conversation with Olivia Arthur (who made the wonderful Stranger ) and Jess Crombie of Save the Children.

There is a lot of talk at present of what photography is for, who it's for and how can it expand it's community.

Empathy is at the heart of that dialogue but I can't help but feeling that in photography it needs to extend beyond the idea of empathy that we have; the empathy we have with the subject.

We also need an empathetic audience, and to reach that audience and make them empathetic, we need empathetic forms of communication. Instead of expecting audiences to lap up our documentary ideas,  or our lame concepts using the detached language of theory, we need to engage them and reach out.

Story-telling is a kind of empathy, simultaneously the purest and least pure form. How can you change the world if they stories that you tell are uninteresting and indeed painful to listen to, if the voice they are told in is painful to listen to. Or, as is often the case in photography or anything really, boring to listen to as well as to look at. That's the killer mix.

So I wonder if empathy in photography can't learn something from film, from fiction, from illustration, from advertising even. Advertising has no ethics, no morals, no values beneath what momentarily fits. But it does a job and it does it really well. It sells us stuff. It sells us ideas, most of which are really bad.

But then there is fiction and film and theatre and dance. There's music, the plastic arts, there's light and sound and there's pleasure. Pleasure's important. And emotion. Pleasure and emotion should be at the heart of most photography and using all those other elements mentioned above to hook us into that combine of pleasure, emotion (even the most tragic of emotions) and photography is something I really appreciate.

Maybe we need to be a bit more selective in what we say and how we say it, what we show and how we show it, and if we need to recognise that pleasure and entertainment has a part to play in our communication of images and the ideas behind them then so be it. Otherwise we're left with a world where everybody talks like they're in a meeting and that doesn't really do it for me on any level. Or for too many other people - except for those who like meetings.

If we can do that, then maybe we can communicate some ideas that are better than the ones that people are buying into right now and see how empathy can attach to advocacy and action. Because that's what we need right now; empathy, advocacy and action.Anyway, there's not too much advocacy or action in the pictures I make so what do I know?

Nevertheless in London, I'll be talking about the elements of empathy in my own work. With my Sofa Portraits, I'll talk about generational and spatial empathy, of remembering what it was to be a certain age in a certain space.

With All Quiet on the Home Front, I'll talk about what it means to be a father, when you don't want to be a father. How do you create empathy in a role that you have no empathy for. How do you create your own empathy if you like.

Here are the details of the talk. I'll love to see you there!



Frobisher Auditorium 2, Barbican Centre
8 December 2016
7pm

What compels photographers to record historic events? Why do they choose to engage in dangerous, difficult work? How do they stay emotionally involved, and what is their legacy today? 

Join Magnum photographer Olivia Arthur, Director of Creative Content at Save the Children Jess Crombie, and writer and photographer Colin Pantall, as they reflect on the role of photography in relation to empathy. In association with an exhibition of David Seymour's work in the Magnum Print Room, speakers will explore the emotions at the heart of documentary photography.

Magnum co-founder David Seymour (1911-1956) was known for his empathetic relationship to photography, which led him to engage deeply with the consequences of WW2 in Europe. In particular he became well-known for his work with the war orphans he photographed for UNICEF. He said of his work:

“We are only trying to tell a story. Let the 17th-century painters worry about the effects. We've got to tell it now, let the news in, show the hungry face, the broken land, anything so that those who are comfortable may be moved a little.”

This event is part of the Magnum Photos Now talks programme at the Barbican Centre. Tickets can be purchased from the Barbican Centre here.

Sofa Portraits on Landscape Stories

It really is lovely to see my Sofa Portraits in such excellent company over at Landscape Stories.

Urbanautica interview

During the summer I had the delight to be interviewed by Steve Bisson of Urbanautica (you can read Steve Bisson being interviewed on Landscape Stories here).

The great thing about this interview was that I got the questions and the first thing that sprang to mind was, What do these mean? The second thing that sprang to mind was Wikipedia and the third thing that sprang to mind was what great questions Steve asked and how  helpful a little bit of Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre can be to understanding and explaining the obsessions of contemporary photography, especially anything that references visual theory, "space" and our consumption of images. You read so many statements saying "I am interested in space and the manner in which the individual relates to blah blah blah." Well Steve really is interested in space, how we inhabit it and the politics of the built and non-built environments..

In the end I understood and appreciated Steve's questions - and they extended my understanding both of other people's work and my own.

Read the full Urbanautica interview with me.

PHOTOTALKS: ‘COLIN PANTALL’

1. Artists who take photographs in this age are fighting someway against the sense of already seen. This might be a chance for a critic attitude to one’s own work?

«Work should have a non-tangible, subjective element that goes beyond being seen towards being felt; something that is not passive, two-dimensional and semiotically limited. To do this is to get into some fuzzy areas where a vague subjectivity reigns. This is not ideal and presents a looseness and lack of clarity of language, but language and rational thought are strictly limited and can not fully explain how photography works.
This is tremendously important as there is the idea (analagous to the end-of-history concept) that it has all been done and there is nothing new. Just as history didn’t end in 1989, so photography hasn’t ended because of the mass of images that we constantly look at. This idea that everything has been done is a sign of the limitations of our own imaginations. If we are changing the number of images we look at and the media through which we view them, perhaps we should also note how this has affected the way in which we look at them and the manner in which our we absorb what we see.
I don’t know how I can critically apply this to my own work, but I think that, despite the mass of domestic and screen-watching images, some of my work is different enough that it hasn’t already been seen, that the combination of looking, physicality, being and ambiguity of space apparent in  my work adds up to a whole that is something more than the parts. Yet what that whole is I’m not sure.»

2. ‘Illusion only is sacred’ wrote Feuerbach in 1841: is his anticipation on the ‘spectacularization of modern age’ still true?

«I am not at all familiar with Feuerbach but I should be. Wikipedia helps and has taught me that Feuerbach believed that iIlusion is sacred but the sacred is also illusion, the product of our fancy projected onto the world to help us control what we cannot understand. We could also say that language and theory are means of controlling what we don’t understand or can’t explain very well. This helps explain the credence we give to sermons pronouncing on art and photography - pronouncements that conceptually spectacularize in themselves. So the spectacularization of the modern age is still relevant, but the question should be who is the spectacularization of the modern age relevant to? And who isn’t it relevant to and why? Why do some people bite the bait of the spectacle and others don’t? To what extent is it a social construct, a game that we all play, including me by answering these questions in this way.

“It has all been done” or “we have seen it all” are examples of this - an intellectual spectacularization of our exhaustion if you like, an elevation of our fatigue into something absolute, concrete and sacred. And that fatigue  seeks to eliminate other (more spectacular) spectacularizations. Perhaps we need to step back from our exhaustion - of words, of images, of soundbites and snippets - and reinvent the spectacle as something that lies beyond our knowledge, experience and field of vision. Because what’s the point of spectacularizing if we don’t do that? We all like to spectacularize. It’s not a bad thing to do, we should enjoy it and embrace it for what it is - a spectacle! So yes, there is a spectacularization of the modern age, but the form it takes is irregular and in documentary photography it has become banal. That makes looking and seeing dull and tedious. And that’s a bad thing.»

3. Through the reading of your interesting writing on Lux Effect, we reflected on the increasing combination of real and imaginary in photography. While hyper-realist painting tends to look like photography and some photographers search for pictorial effects, what remain essential?

«Hyper-realist paintings still look like paintings and pictorial photographs (especially those designed to look like hyper-realist paintings) still look like photographs. They look like what they are. And if you want to make them look more like what they aren’t, well that’s fine too. It’s a handy trick to play. But the attractions of doing that are strictly limited. The value of Loretta Lux’s work was in the real side of the children she photographed and the vulnerability of that reality. It lay beyond the fictions.»

4. ‘Write what you know’ has been claimed by author William Burroughs as a criterion for good writing. Does this apply to photography too? How important is knowledge?

«I can go both ways on this. Knowledge is not that important, but research is, research that includes some kind of sentiment that brings the outside world to the image, that takes us outside the three dimensions of the print or computer screen or book. People often say they want their pictures to do their talking for them, but so often their pictures are mute, they have no voice, no passion, no touch to connect beyond their title. So research can help add depth and knowledge.
At the same time, photography is not research. A project can be deeply researched, have great images and interesting back stories, but still have an emptiness about it. This kind of project might hit all the theoretical and critical buttons but if the project has been undertaken purely to hit all those buttons, one has to question its value.

More important than knowledge and research is passion and conviction. You need to invest something in what you photograph - the Bechers had a passion for water towers and smelting plants. And it shows, in a good way. Too many people photograph what they think they ought to. That shows too, but in a bad way.»

5) In your Sofa Portraits the observer is projected in domestic interior spaces, which stages well the inevitable loss of intimacy produced by Henry Lefebvre’s ‘predominance of visualization’. In your photography the relationship with childhood is a recurring theme, why?

«’The predominance of visualisation serves to conceal repetitiveness. People look and take sight, take seeing, for life itself’. I think that is a quote from Lefebvre but I’m not quite sure how the repetition works in the realm of the domestic. I like to think there are different elements of repetition and different elements of intimacy in Sofa Portraits, which resonate in unpredictable ways depending on who is viewing the images.
I am trying to show how the spaces created by Isabel are similar to Lefebvre’s ‘differential spaces’ - a product of her resistance to parental and domestic definitions of where she should be and how she act in those places. My interest in the domestic is purely pragmatic. I spend some time away from home and I love my family so I want to photograph the people and places that are near me. That also creates  different visual and spatial relationships with both people and sites in my photographs that draws me into different aspects of body and space. The work I am currently editing looks at the different physical environments my daughter inhabits and how she makes those spaces her own and how those spaces have changed over two periods of time - the short term, personal interactions and the long term engineering and social interactions. At the same time, the work emerges from spending time with my daughter in flawed but beautiful environments where differences can also emerge from Isabel’s (and my) evolving relationship with the world around her. I also find it costly to travel to other places for my work. So I photograph what is around me in the most immediate sense. The photography is always secondary until after the event when it becomes primary.» 

Sofa Portraits Book for Sale

Sofa Portraits is now available in bookform - 42 pages, 29 pictures, measuring 30cm x 21cm. It's in an edition of 60.

It's handmade with a Japanese stab-stitched hardcover binding. I was looking for a cover that matched the sofa in the picture. I couldn't find one, but worked out with normal bookcloth the time limitations, imperfections and design flaws of a handmade book more than matched the dilapidated state I was trying to recreate. It's not perfect in other words.

If you would like a copy, they are £60  - made payable to colinpantall@yahoo.co.uk at paypal. Postage and packing is included in that.

Global Photography Show in Venice

My Sofa Portraits will be on show at the Global Photography Show (curated by Massimo Sordi  and Stefania Rössl) at the Galleriana Contemporaneo )in Venice. Opens tomorrow so all you Venetians head over there for some fantastic photography.

Sleeping

Domesticated Opening: Swindon

Opening tonight and running until February 28th is Domesticated.

It's at the PostModern Gallery (in the old post office), right next to the Wyvern Theatre. Two of my large Sofa Portraits are in along with all other kinds of wonderful stuff. 

Domesticated in Bath

If you are in the Bath area this Thursday, do come to The Walcot Chapel, where I have a couple of Sofa Portraits in a group show called Domesticated (sorry Amy Stein). Curated by Callum Bell, it features some wonderful painting, sculpture, insttallation and photography, all on the theme of we should get out more.

It's at the lovely Walcot Chapel, just off Walcot Street, just up the street from the Bell. Preview is on Thursday 8th October, 6-9pm.

Savignano Festival of Photography

I am delighted to have my Sofa Portraits in the Global Photography show at the Photo Festival of Savignano in Italy. Curated by Massimo Sordi and Steffania Rosl, the show is part of a year round photographic project in Savignano that focuses on the connections between identity, environment and culture - lots of fabulous and familiar names in there, with a strong focus on concentrated portraiture.

I really wish I could be there because it sounds great and Massimo and his gang are so charming. Good luck to you all - basi, basi.

GLOBAL:PHOTOGRAPHY 09

curated by Massimo Sordi, Stefania Rössl

@ SIFEST 2009 – Photo Festival of Savignano, Italy

11^th september-4^th october 2009

www.savignanoimmagini.it

evan baden (USA)/

catherine balet (F)/

mathieu bernard-reymond (CH)/

michele cera (I)/

samantha cohn (USA)/

jen davis (USA)/

wolfram hahn (D)/

alessandro imbriaco/francesco millefiori (I)/

seba kurtis (ARG)/

molly landreth (USA)/

kalpesh lathigra (UK)/

maria leutner (D)/

andrés marroquín winkelmann (PERU)/

colin pantall (UK)/

andrew phelps (A)/

marion poussier (F)/

blerim racaj (UK)/

richard renaldi (USA)/

frank rothe (D)/

carla van de puttelaar (NL)/

shen wei (CHINA)

DIMENSIONEMASSIMA 10x12 CM

The cult of the small print gathers pace with this show in Rome run by the charmsters at CameraOscura and 3x3. Some of my Sofa Portraits will be in there so do drop by if you are lucky enough to be in Rome. Everything is sized at 5 x 4 which is very democratic! DIMENSIONEMASSIMA 10x12 CM CURATED BY CAMERAOSCURA and 3/3 VIA FIVIZZANO 27, VIA DEL PIGNETO 91 - CHICCEN, VIA DEL PIGNETO 19 - TUBA VIA ASCOLI PICENO 3 - HOBO ART CLUB ROMA ° FROM 4TH JUNE TO THE 28TH 2009, 6 - 10 PM OPENING 4TH JUNE FROM 20 PM
	INFO AND PRESS OFFICE: CAMERAOSCURA.ORG - TRETERZI.ORG - DIMENSIONEMASSIMA10X12CM@GMAIL.COM

How not to Photograph: Hasn't She Grown Part 2

pictures: Colin Pantall (from Seven Stages of an Idealized Childhood)


Forget that last post. What a load of twaddle!

Photographing children, especially if they are your own children, is great. It cannot be recommended enough. Instead of gallivanting all over the place photographing bridges, tribesmen and dead pigeons at great personal and financial expense, you get to spend time with your family and kids.

You can see how they grow up, how they change. You can photograph the tears, the fears, the trauma and the joy. You can make series of them doing different things and relate this to different theories of child care and development, capturing them as they climb up from squawling newborn to egocentric toddler and burgeoning self-awareness. While you do this you get closer to your child and learn something about yourself and the footsteps of your life.

You can give your series a title - "The Seven Stages of an Idealized Childhood" is the one for me - and then you can edit your work right down to the 40 images that will be the perfect portrayal of what it is to be a child - because that's the thing we are all trying to capture.

Childhood is tender, beautiful, brutal and traumatic - so there is an emotional gamut you can capture. The environment you photograph in may be domestic, but what you photograph can be extraordinary, the glances, postures and poses that show the physical and emotional side of becoming a child, an adult, a human. At it's best, photographing children is honest, raw, physical, emotional, psychological, cultural and incredibly political.

What could be better, more worthwhile or more valuable than that?

More Art Photography Categories

There were some interesting suggestions for the art photography categories:

Gas stations and shrubbery in an urban space were suggested - both of which could fit into the liminal category as well as their own. Depends on how you look at it.

Uninteresting subjects in front of interesting wallpaper got a mention (bit of a value judgement in there though) - but that is a bit specific. The wallpaper is nice though and could perhaps fit into a new domestic details and detritus section.

And someone mentioned friends/lovers/daughters on beige sofas.

Again, a tad too specific, and not sure exactly what he is getting at. But I think this might be the kind of image he had in mind - Sofa Portrait #23.