All Quiet on the Home Front
What do our dreams tell us? Dreams derive from real life and the connections are constrained by unconscious desires. For British photographer Colin Pantall, a dream drove him to reflect on the fears that sat deep within him when he became a parent.
Photography & text Colin Pantall
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, all of which were balanced precariously on the tree’s branches. It also 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.
“It’s a series of landscapes, it’s the story of becoming a child and becoming a father.”
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 unreliable fragments of photographic memory that have become an attempt to remember.
“That sense of morbidity, claustrophobia, and anxiety is at the heart of All Quiet on the Home Front.”
About Colin
Colin Pantall is a writer, lecturer and photographer based in Bath, Europe.
He has written for a range of publications and organisations including, World Press Photo, Magnum, Source Magazine, Foam, the British Journal of Photography, Ph Museum of Humanity, Blind Magazine. Colin teaches on photography undergraduate and MA courses and runs an online lectures and workshops linking contemporary photography to global, historical, and narrational perspectives.
His photography is motivated by the opportunism presented by immediate domestic environments and family, and include his projects Sofa Portraits, All Quiet on the Home Front, and My German Family Album, projects that look at his own family and surroundings from put together from the unreliable fragments of his personal, environmental, and historical perspectives.
To see more of his work, visit his website or follow him on Instagram
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