Brexit Pictures by Colin Pantall

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. That’s why he recently published Brexit Pictures, a newspaper (already sold-out) whose tagline is “’you won’t like it, it doesn’t make sense, it’s a waste of money” – and that should be enough to convey the feeling of his project.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…

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Source: vogue.it