The Social Landscape After Brexit: A Photographer’s View

After a vote like that, a certain kind of silence descends upon a nation. The silence of something incomplete, not the silence of resolution. The arguments continued even after 51.9 percent of British citizens decided to leave the European Union in June 2016; they simply shifted from television screens to living rooms, pub corners, and family dinners. It turns out that photographers were observing everything.

During the four years between the referendum and the formal withdrawal on January 31, 2020, they recorded more than one story. There were dozens of them, sometimes painful, sometimes ridiculous, and frequently at odds with one another. Through the cameras of a dispersed but remarkably involved group of artists, the post-Brexit social landscape appears less like a nation that made a decision and more like one that wasn’t entirely sure what it had decided—or why.

Three days after the election, Ed Alcock began driving. The Franco-British photographer, who was employed by the French newspaper Le Monde, purposefully left London. He didn’t want to tell the story of the capital, with its 60 percent Remain majority and its dense cosmopolitan energy. He traveled to the Cambridgeshire town of Wisbech, where seven out of ten voters had selected Leave. He made a stop in the rural Yorkshire town of Bradford, Port Talbot.

He took pictures of unemployed steel workers, pensioners in front of their homes, and farmers who felt that no one in Westminster had taken the time to learn about their real lives. A picture from Exeter University shows a member of the administrative staff with a distressed expression on their face, and the caption reads like a report from a place that had just experienced a shock. That Friday morning, the hallways had been compared to a mortuary.

Alcock repeatedly discovered that voters in disparate towns were using nearly identical language to justify their choices. The same words kept coming up: control, immigration, and Brussels. It’s difficult to ignore how accurately that captures the potency of political messaging when it finds favorable conditions. These communities weren’t ignorant. They were worn out. The steel jobs had disappeared in the 1980s and had not returned. Budgets for local councils were meager. After twenty years of feeling out of control, the promise of “taking back control” struck a different chord.

Really, Martin Parr had been observing all of this for decades. Beneath the humor, his signature saturated-color paintings of cream teas, Morris dancers, and St. George’s Day parades had always carried an uneasy undertone. He once acknowledged having a love-hate relationship with his subject. His images of British pageantry and establishment ritual began to take on new meanings in the years after the referendum. It started to feel more like a record of a nation withdrawing into a version of itself that might never have existed than what had initially appeared to be a wry observation of national peculiarities. Depending on how you voted, that may or may not be interpreted as cultural pride.

Laura Pannack’s “Separation” may be the project that most subtly conveys the personal cost of Brexit. In 2018, Pannack was commissioned by the British Journal of Photography to take pictures of two couples, one British and the other from a member state of the European Union, with a thin, opaque veil between them. The faces on either side of the veil convey a lot despite its basic, almost theatrical, design. Yes, anxiety, but also something more rebellious. These individuals had built lives together, only to have those lives abruptly labeled as a policy issue. Pannack’s query, “What does Brexit mean for love?” seems almost too straightforward. It doesn’t seem straightforward at all when you look at the pictures.

Uta Késelsberger was operating from a similarly intimate location. As a German artist residing in the UK, she saw the community she had worked so hard to create in Britain start to fall apart. Her “Uncertain Subjects” series began as a mail-art project consisting of postcards with the words “non-confirmed resident status” printed beneath the names of European residents. In contrast to the warmth of the faces, the phrase has an air of bureaucratic coldness.

After years of employment, tax payments, child-rearing, and friendship-building in the UK, these individuals were labeled as bargaining chips. In the end, Késelsberger enlarged the portraits into massive billboard installations that were adhered in waves over one another in public areas in Bristol, Newcastle, and London. As more layers were added, the images blended together. It appeared as though a community was disintegrating. That was the idea.

Simon Roberts took a different stance on Brexit, focusing more on the terminology used to characterize it than on the individuals affected by it. A journalist was positioned in front of a teleprompter in his “Brexit Lexicon” installation, where they had to scroll through five thousand neologisms that had surfaced during the negotiations, such as “Brexit betrayal, Brexit block, Brexit brain-drain.”

Occasionally, the reporter falters and stops to drink. The overall impact is in the middle of humor and despair. Roberts was intrigued by the way that media and political language had begun to sound alike—hollow expressions that were repeated throughout news cycles until they had virtually no meaning. Whether or not the majority of news viewers at the time realized how manufactured the discourse was is still up for debate. According to Roberts’ research, they ought to have.

Above all, Paul Sng’s “Invisible Britain” adopted the broadest perspective. Forty photographers and their subjects from the nation’s post-industrial heartlands collaborated to produce this book, which featured portraits of people navigating low-paying jobs, mental health crises, welfare cuts, and bureaucratic systems that seemed more intended to wear them out than to help. Although it is mentioned in the testimonies, Brexit is not the main topic. The main issue is that communities were structurally weakened by ten years of austerity long before a ballot was placed in front of them. Sng argues that the anger that propelled the Leave vote had deeper, older roots than the referendum campaign acknowledged. This argument is never stated explicitly, but it is evident in every picture.

When you look at all of this work together, you get the impression that photographers were slowing down enough to actually look, something that politicians and commentators routinely failed to do. Alcock was traveling through communities that had not seen a national reporter in many years. Pannack sat with couples who wanted someone to understand what they were going through, so they consented to be photographed behind a veil. Kögelsberger is recruiting strangers at anti-Brexit events and asking them to bare their shoulders for a portrait that would be plastered, giant, on a wall in Shoreditch.

Where you stand to take pictures of the post-Brexit social landscape greatly influences how it appears. From the white cliffs of Sussex — a landscape Roberts used deliberately, knowing its symbolic weight — it can look like a nation on the edge of something, not quite sure whether the drop will be survivable. It appears to be something different from Wisbech, Bradford, or Port Talbot: a protracted, gradual tiredness that is at last making a name for itself. Both images are incomplete. They are both genuine.