Afropean: Johny Pitts on homes, history, and photography
Ahead of the photographer's new podcast, we dive into Johny Pitts' James Baldwin-inspired response to the multiplicity of Black British culture across the UK...
October 23, 2024
For photographer and writer Johny Pitts, a picture isn’t worth a thousand words. It’s ‘more like a haiku’, something short, which provokes more questions and responses than answers. Sheffield-born and raised, when Pitts moved to Paris post-Brexit, he didn’t think he would ever return to England. It’s a subject grappled with in his best-selling book, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (2019) – for which a companion photobook and podcast, with voices like Kalaf Epalanga, will launch in November 2024. But in 2021, Pitts took his camera and set out with the poet Roger Robinson to answer a different question often posed to him: 'What is Black Britain?'
Starting in London – and Pitts’ current home, in Peckham – the pair travelled clockwise around the coast, from Tilbury to Liverpool, Belfast to Edinburgh. They might have followed train lines, Pitts tells me, but water is more closely linked with historic migration, and flows into our contemporary political landscape of small boats, border crossings, and ‘refugee crises’. Their journey, documented in the recent touring exhibition and book, Home Is Not a Place, crosses similar boundaries of poetry and photography.
Pitts’ photographs challenge the ‘Brixtonisation’ of Blackness, picturing a plurality of everyday experiences. We see Kenya Fried Chicken shops, and COP26 in Scotland, which Pitts’ critiques as an inherently white movement. Travelling in the context of COVID, he remarks how the pandemic actually encouraged many Black people to spend more time in rural, countryside areas – environments from which they are typically excluded.
For Pitts, this is a project ‘from, not about, Black Britain’. His everyday images of ordinary people resist binary media representations of either Black excellence, or criminality. There are no kings or queens, nor staged studio photographs of great African photography in Pitts’ exhibitions. (Those could be found a few stops away on the London Underground, at the Tate Modern exhibition, A World in Common, which ran concurrently with Pitts’ exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2023.) Instead, Pitts’ subjects come ‘consciously uncaptioned’, one of many subtle interventions (and academic interpretations) by curator Karen McQuaid – and one which here works.
There’s some distance between the self-proclaimed self-taught photographer and Home’s most recent place of display at The Photographers’ Gallery. It’s somewhat resolved by the intimate installation, which includes a Living Room and sofa to sit and reflect, and wooden tables, printed with found and family photographs. Titled after James Baldwin’s unfinished play Welcome Table, they’re turned into sites for starting conversations, to be continued beyond the gallery space.
The exhibition’s title also borrows from Baldwin, that ‘home is not a place but an irrevocable condition’; the idea of a poetry-photography collaboration from his fellow Americans, Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava. Home is as much a homage to those who have coloured Pitts’ practice. The walls are papered with archive materials, from early covers of Paul Gilroy’s book, The Black Atlantic (1993), to Konica-branded camera film, exposing a long interest in photography ephemera.
Curated together, they create a sense of timelessness that is deeply rooted in place. Leafing through leather albums from his childhood home in Sheffield, we find shots of Yorkshire puddings and Mount Fuji, gravy boats and GARO-style comic book covers. Indeed, Pitts’ interest in Japan goes far beyond poetry; his father was a Northern Soul musician, invited to travel to Asia with the musical Starlight Express, a bubble to which Pitts returns in his project, Sequel to a Dream: Ghosts of 1980s Japan. Here, we get but a glimpse of the artist’s past, in ‘a fleeting presentation’ of this new work, but it’s a promising look at the future.
Family and community are at the heart of Pitts’ practice; he scarcely represents himself, often playing on his brother’s similar likeness in his other works. Fellow artist Chantal Pitts lends her brother her local pirate radio playlists to soundtrack the space at The Photographers’ Gallery, alongside the tables upon which his photo albums rest.
Home is a warm welcome to those who might not typically visit museums and galleries, a reclamation of these cultural spaces as their homes too. Indeed, many of those who visited its previous iterations in Stills, Edinburgh, and Graves Gallery, Sheffield, told Pitts that his exhibition marked their first visit to a white cube.
With posters installed in Peckham and Brixton – communities photographed in this project – The Photographers’ Gallery hoped to reach audiences beyond the Guardian readers who lauded Pitts’ Afropean. The artist, as broadcaster, is equally critical of the need to diversify and pluralise the arts and culture media.
It’s a pleasure to see and experience Pitts’ practice extending into curation. Without seeing into this future, his curators in London could have taken a leaf out of their overlapping exhibition of Evelyn Hofer’s practice, by showing, not telling or labouring, the ‘multicultural working-class’ context of his work. It’s clear, and relevant, to all those who enter the front door.
Johny Pitts: Home is Not a Place was on view at Graves Gallery in Sheffield, Stills in Edinburgh and The Photographers’ Gallery in London. For more, listen to the artist on this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast.
After the End of History: British Working Class Photography, 1989 – 2024, curated by Johny Pitts for Hayward Gallery Touring, is on view at Bonington Gallery in Nottingham until 14 December 2024, and Stills in Edinburgh from 21 March 2025.
Afropean Podcast and Afropean Journal, published by Mörel, will launch on 5 November 2024, to coincide with Paris Photo 2024.
For photographer and writer Johny Pitts, a picture isn’t worth a thousand words. It’s ‘more like a haiku’, something short, which provokes more questions and responses than answers. Sheffield-born and raised, when Pitts moved to Paris post-Brexit, he didn’t think he would ever return to England. It’s a subject grappled with in his best-selling book, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (2019) – for which a companion photobook and podcast, with voices like Kalaf Epalanga, will launch in November 2024. But in 2021, Pitts took his camera and set out with the poet Roger Robinson to answer a different question often posed to him: 'What is Black Britain?'
Starting in London – and Pitts’ current home, in Peckham – the pair travelled clockwise around the coast, from Tilbury to Liverpool, Belfast to Edinburgh. They might have followed train lines, Pitts tells me, but water is more closely linked with historic migration, and flows into our contemporary political landscape of small boats, border crossings, and ‘refugee crises’. Their journey, documented in the recent touring exhibition and book, Home Is Not a Place, crosses similar boundaries of poetry and photography.
Pitts’ photographs challenge the ‘Brixtonisation’ of Blackness, picturing a plurality of everyday experiences. We see Kenya Fried Chicken shops, and COP26 in Scotland, which Pitts’ critiques as an inherently white movement. Travelling in the context of COVID, he remarks how the pandemic actually encouraged many Black people to spend more time in rural, countryside areas – environments from which they are typically excluded.
For Pitts, this is a project ‘from, not about, Black Britain’. His everyday images of ordinary people resist binary media representations of either Black excellence, or criminality. There are no kings or queens, nor staged studio photographs of great African photography in Pitts’ exhibitions. (Those could be found a few stops away on the London Underground, at the Tate Modern exhibition, A World in Common, which ran concurrently with Pitts’ exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2023.) Instead, Pitts’ subjects come ‘consciously uncaptioned’, one of many subtle interventions (and academic interpretations) by curator Karen McQuaid – and one which here works.
There’s some distance between the self-proclaimed self-taught photographer and Home’s most recent place of display at The Photographers’ Gallery. It’s somewhat resolved by the intimate installation, which includes a Living Room and sofa to sit and reflect, and wooden tables, printed with found and family photographs. Titled after James Baldwin’s unfinished play Welcome Table, they’re turned into sites for starting conversations, to be continued beyond the gallery space.
The exhibition’s title also borrows from Baldwin, that ‘home is not a place but an irrevocable condition’; the idea of a poetry-photography collaboration from his fellow Americans, Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava. Home is as much a homage to those who have coloured Pitts’ practice. The walls are papered with archive materials, from early covers of Paul Gilroy’s book, The Black Atlantic (1993), to Konica-branded camera film, exposing a long interest in photography ephemera.
Curated together, they create a sense of timelessness that is deeply rooted in place. Leafing through leather albums from his childhood home in Sheffield, we find shots of Yorkshire puddings and Mount Fuji, gravy boats and GARO-style comic book covers. Indeed, Pitts’ interest in Japan goes far beyond poetry; his father was a Northern Soul musician, invited to travel to Asia with the musical Starlight Express, a bubble to which Pitts returns in his project, Sequel to a Dream: Ghosts of 1980s Japan. Here, we get but a glimpse of the artist’s past, in ‘a fleeting presentation’ of this new work, but it’s a promising look at the future.
Family and community are at the heart of Pitts’ practice; he scarcely represents himself, often playing on his brother’s similar likeness in his other works. Fellow artist Chantal Pitts lends her brother her local pirate radio playlists to soundtrack the space at The Photographers’ Gallery, alongside the tables upon which his photo albums rest.
Home is a warm welcome to those who might not typically visit museums and galleries, a reclamation of these cultural spaces as their homes too. Indeed, many of those who visited its previous iterations in Stills, Edinburgh, and Graves Gallery, Sheffield, told Pitts that his exhibition marked their first visit to a white cube.
With posters installed in Peckham and Brixton – communities photographed in this project – The Photographers’ Gallery hoped to reach audiences beyond the Guardian readers who lauded Pitts’ Afropean. The artist, as broadcaster, is equally critical of the need to diversify and pluralise the arts and culture media.
It’s a pleasure to see and experience Pitts’ practice extending into curation. Without seeing into this future, his curators in London could have taken a leaf out of their overlapping exhibition of Evelyn Hofer’s practice, by showing, not telling or labouring, the ‘multicultural working-class’ context of his work. It’s clear, and relevant, to all those who enter the front door.
Johny Pitts: Home is Not a Place was on view at Graves Gallery in Sheffield, Stills in Edinburgh and The Photographers’ Gallery in London. For more, listen to the artist on this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast.
After the End of History: British Working Class Photography, 1989 – 2024, curated by Johny Pitts for Hayward Gallery Touring, is on view at Bonington Gallery in Nottingham until 14 December 2024, and Stills in Edinburgh from 21 March 2025.
Afropean Podcast and Afropean Journal, published by Mörel, will launch on 5 November 2024, to coincide with Paris Photo 2024.
For photographer and writer Johny Pitts, a picture isn’t worth a thousand words. It’s ‘more like a haiku’, something short, which provokes more questions and responses than answers. Sheffield-born and raised, when Pitts moved to Paris post-Brexit, he didn’t think he would ever return to England. It’s a subject grappled with in his best-selling book, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (2019) – for which a companion photobook and podcast, with voices like Kalaf Epalanga, will launch in November 2024. But in 2021, Pitts took his camera and set out with the poet Roger Robinson to answer a different question often posed to him: 'What is Black Britain?'
Starting in London – and Pitts’ current home, in Peckham – the pair travelled clockwise around the coast, from Tilbury to Liverpool, Belfast to Edinburgh. They might have followed train lines, Pitts tells me, but water is more closely linked with historic migration, and flows into our contemporary political landscape of small boats, border crossings, and ‘refugee crises’. Their journey, documented in the recent touring exhibition and book, Home Is Not a Place, crosses similar boundaries of poetry and photography.
Pitts’ photographs challenge the ‘Brixtonisation’ of Blackness, picturing a plurality of everyday experiences. We see Kenya Fried Chicken shops, and COP26 in Scotland, which Pitts’ critiques as an inherently white movement. Travelling in the context of COVID, he remarks how the pandemic actually encouraged many Black people to spend more time in rural, countryside areas – environments from which they are typically excluded.
For Pitts, this is a project ‘from, not about, Black Britain’. His everyday images of ordinary people resist binary media representations of either Black excellence, or criminality. There are no kings or queens, nor staged studio photographs of great African photography in Pitts’ exhibitions. (Those could be found a few stops away on the London Underground, at the Tate Modern exhibition, A World in Common, which ran concurrently with Pitts’ exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2023.) Instead, Pitts’ subjects come ‘consciously uncaptioned’, one of many subtle interventions (and academic interpretations) by curator Karen McQuaid – and one which here works.
There’s some distance between the self-proclaimed self-taught photographer and Home’s most recent place of display at The Photographers’ Gallery. It’s somewhat resolved by the intimate installation, which includes a Living Room and sofa to sit and reflect, and wooden tables, printed with found and family photographs. Titled after James Baldwin’s unfinished play Welcome Table, they’re turned into sites for starting conversations, to be continued beyond the gallery space.
The exhibition’s title also borrows from Baldwin, that ‘home is not a place but an irrevocable condition’; the idea of a poetry-photography collaboration from his fellow Americans, Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava. Home is as much a homage to those who have coloured Pitts’ practice. The walls are papered with archive materials, from early covers of Paul Gilroy’s book, The Black Atlantic (1993), to Konica-branded camera film, exposing a long interest in photography ephemera.
Curated together, they create a sense of timelessness that is deeply rooted in place. Leafing through leather albums from his childhood home in Sheffield, we find shots of Yorkshire puddings and Mount Fuji, gravy boats and GARO-style comic book covers. Indeed, Pitts’ interest in Japan goes far beyond poetry; his father was a Northern Soul musician, invited to travel to Asia with the musical Starlight Express, a bubble to which Pitts returns in his project, Sequel to a Dream: Ghosts of 1980s Japan. Here, we get but a glimpse of the artist’s past, in ‘a fleeting presentation’ of this new work, but it’s a promising look at the future.
Family and community are at the heart of Pitts’ practice; he scarcely represents himself, often playing on his brother’s similar likeness in his other works. Fellow artist Chantal Pitts lends her brother her local pirate radio playlists to soundtrack the space at The Photographers’ Gallery, alongside the tables upon which his photo albums rest.
Home is a warm welcome to those who might not typically visit museums and galleries, a reclamation of these cultural spaces as their homes too. Indeed, many of those who visited its previous iterations in Stills, Edinburgh, and Graves Gallery, Sheffield, told Pitts that his exhibition marked their first visit to a white cube.
With posters installed in Peckham and Brixton – communities photographed in this project – The Photographers’ Gallery hoped to reach audiences beyond the Guardian readers who lauded Pitts’ Afropean. The artist, as broadcaster, is equally critical of the need to diversify and pluralise the arts and culture media.
It’s a pleasure to see and experience Pitts’ practice extending into curation. Without seeing into this future, his curators in London could have taken a leaf out of their overlapping exhibition of Evelyn Hofer’s practice, by showing, not telling or labouring, the ‘multicultural working-class’ context of his work. It’s clear, and relevant, to all those who enter the front door.
Johny Pitts: Home is Not a Place was on view at Graves Gallery in Sheffield, Stills in Edinburgh and The Photographers’ Gallery in London. For more, listen to the artist on this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast.
After the End of History: British Working Class Photography, 1989 – 2024, curated by Johny Pitts for Hayward Gallery Touring, is on view at Bonington Gallery in Nottingham until 14 December 2024, and Stills in Edinburgh from 21 March 2025.
Afropean Podcast and Afropean Journal, published by Mörel, will launch on 5 November 2024, to coincide with Paris Photo 2024.
For photographer and writer Johny Pitts, a picture isn’t worth a thousand words. It’s ‘more like a haiku’, something short, which provokes more questions and responses than answers. Sheffield-born and raised, when Pitts moved to Paris post-Brexit, he didn’t think he would ever return to England. It’s a subject grappled with in his best-selling book, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (2019) – for which a companion photobook and podcast, with voices like Kalaf Epalanga, will launch in November 2024. But in 2021, Pitts took his camera and set out with the poet Roger Robinson to answer a different question often posed to him: 'What is Black Britain?'
Starting in London – and Pitts’ current home, in Peckham – the pair travelled clockwise around the coast, from Tilbury to Liverpool, Belfast to Edinburgh. They might have followed train lines, Pitts tells me, but water is more closely linked with historic migration, and flows into our contemporary political landscape of small boats, border crossings, and ‘refugee crises’. Their journey, documented in the recent touring exhibition and book, Home Is Not a Place, crosses similar boundaries of poetry and photography.
Pitts’ photographs challenge the ‘Brixtonisation’ of Blackness, picturing a plurality of everyday experiences. We see Kenya Fried Chicken shops, and COP26 in Scotland, which Pitts’ critiques as an inherently white movement. Travelling in the context of COVID, he remarks how the pandemic actually encouraged many Black people to spend more time in rural, countryside areas – environments from which they are typically excluded.
For Pitts, this is a project ‘from, not about, Black Britain’. His everyday images of ordinary people resist binary media representations of either Black excellence, or criminality. There are no kings or queens, nor staged studio photographs of great African photography in Pitts’ exhibitions. (Those could be found a few stops away on the London Underground, at the Tate Modern exhibition, A World in Common, which ran concurrently with Pitts’ exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2023.) Instead, Pitts’ subjects come ‘consciously uncaptioned’, one of many subtle interventions (and academic interpretations) by curator Karen McQuaid – and one which here works.
There’s some distance between the self-proclaimed self-taught photographer and Home’s most recent place of display at The Photographers’ Gallery. It’s somewhat resolved by the intimate installation, which includes a Living Room and sofa to sit and reflect, and wooden tables, printed with found and family photographs. Titled after James Baldwin’s unfinished play Welcome Table, they’re turned into sites for starting conversations, to be continued beyond the gallery space.
The exhibition’s title also borrows from Baldwin, that ‘home is not a place but an irrevocable condition’; the idea of a poetry-photography collaboration from his fellow Americans, Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava. Home is as much a homage to those who have coloured Pitts’ practice. The walls are papered with archive materials, from early covers of Paul Gilroy’s book, The Black Atlantic (1993), to Konica-branded camera film, exposing a long interest in photography ephemera.
Curated together, they create a sense of timelessness that is deeply rooted in place. Leafing through leather albums from his childhood home in Sheffield, we find shots of Yorkshire puddings and Mount Fuji, gravy boats and GARO-style comic book covers. Indeed, Pitts’ interest in Japan goes far beyond poetry; his father was a Northern Soul musician, invited to travel to Asia with the musical Starlight Express, a bubble to which Pitts returns in his project, Sequel to a Dream: Ghosts of 1980s Japan. Here, we get but a glimpse of the artist’s past, in ‘a fleeting presentation’ of this new work, but it’s a promising look at the future.
Family and community are at the heart of Pitts’ practice; he scarcely represents himself, often playing on his brother’s similar likeness in his other works. Fellow artist Chantal Pitts lends her brother her local pirate radio playlists to soundtrack the space at The Photographers’ Gallery, alongside the tables upon which his photo albums rest.
Home is a warm welcome to those who might not typically visit museums and galleries, a reclamation of these cultural spaces as their homes too. Indeed, many of those who visited its previous iterations in Stills, Edinburgh, and Graves Gallery, Sheffield, told Pitts that his exhibition marked their first visit to a white cube.
With posters installed in Peckham and Brixton – communities photographed in this project – The Photographers’ Gallery hoped to reach audiences beyond the Guardian readers who lauded Pitts’ Afropean. The artist, as broadcaster, is equally critical of the need to diversify and pluralise the arts and culture media.
It’s a pleasure to see and experience Pitts’ practice extending into curation. Without seeing into this future, his curators in London could have taken a leaf out of their overlapping exhibition of Evelyn Hofer’s practice, by showing, not telling or labouring, the ‘multicultural working-class’ context of his work. It’s clear, and relevant, to all those who enter the front door.
Johny Pitts: Home is Not a Place was on view at Graves Gallery in Sheffield, Stills in Edinburgh and The Photographers’ Gallery in London. For more, listen to the artist on this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast.
After the End of History: British Working Class Photography, 1989 – 2024, curated by Johny Pitts for Hayward Gallery Touring, is on view at Bonington Gallery in Nottingham until 14 December 2024, and Stills in Edinburgh from 21 March 2025.
Afropean Podcast and Afropean Journal, published by Mörel, will launch on 5 November 2024, to coincide with Paris Photo 2024.
For photographer and writer Johny Pitts, a picture isn’t worth a thousand words. It’s ‘more like a haiku’, something short, which provokes more questions and responses than answers. Sheffield-born and raised, when Pitts moved to Paris post-Brexit, he didn’t think he would ever return to England. It’s a subject grappled with in his best-selling book, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (2019) – for which a companion photobook and podcast, with voices like Kalaf Epalanga, will launch in November 2024. But in 2021, Pitts took his camera and set out with the poet Roger Robinson to answer a different question often posed to him: 'What is Black Britain?'
Starting in London – and Pitts’ current home, in Peckham – the pair travelled clockwise around the coast, from Tilbury to Liverpool, Belfast to Edinburgh. They might have followed train lines, Pitts tells me, but water is more closely linked with historic migration, and flows into our contemporary political landscape of small boats, border crossings, and ‘refugee crises’. Their journey, documented in the recent touring exhibition and book, Home Is Not a Place, crosses similar boundaries of poetry and photography.
Pitts’ photographs challenge the ‘Brixtonisation’ of Blackness, picturing a plurality of everyday experiences. We see Kenya Fried Chicken shops, and COP26 in Scotland, which Pitts’ critiques as an inherently white movement. Travelling in the context of COVID, he remarks how the pandemic actually encouraged many Black people to spend more time in rural, countryside areas – environments from which they are typically excluded.
For Pitts, this is a project ‘from, not about, Black Britain’. His everyday images of ordinary people resist binary media representations of either Black excellence, or criminality. There are no kings or queens, nor staged studio photographs of great African photography in Pitts’ exhibitions. (Those could be found a few stops away on the London Underground, at the Tate Modern exhibition, A World in Common, which ran concurrently with Pitts’ exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2023.) Instead, Pitts’ subjects come ‘consciously uncaptioned’, one of many subtle interventions (and academic interpretations) by curator Karen McQuaid – and one which here works.
There’s some distance between the self-proclaimed self-taught photographer and Home’s most recent place of display at The Photographers’ Gallery. It’s somewhat resolved by the intimate installation, which includes a Living Room and sofa to sit and reflect, and wooden tables, printed with found and family photographs. Titled after James Baldwin’s unfinished play Welcome Table, they’re turned into sites for starting conversations, to be continued beyond the gallery space.
The exhibition’s title also borrows from Baldwin, that ‘home is not a place but an irrevocable condition’; the idea of a poetry-photography collaboration from his fellow Americans, Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava. Home is as much a homage to those who have coloured Pitts’ practice. The walls are papered with archive materials, from early covers of Paul Gilroy’s book, The Black Atlantic (1993), to Konica-branded camera film, exposing a long interest in photography ephemera.
Curated together, they create a sense of timelessness that is deeply rooted in place. Leafing through leather albums from his childhood home in Sheffield, we find shots of Yorkshire puddings and Mount Fuji, gravy boats and GARO-style comic book covers. Indeed, Pitts’ interest in Japan goes far beyond poetry; his father was a Northern Soul musician, invited to travel to Asia with the musical Starlight Express, a bubble to which Pitts returns in his project, Sequel to a Dream: Ghosts of 1980s Japan. Here, we get but a glimpse of the artist’s past, in ‘a fleeting presentation’ of this new work, but it’s a promising look at the future.
Family and community are at the heart of Pitts’ practice; he scarcely represents himself, often playing on his brother’s similar likeness in his other works. Fellow artist Chantal Pitts lends her brother her local pirate radio playlists to soundtrack the space at The Photographers’ Gallery, alongside the tables upon which his photo albums rest.
Home is a warm welcome to those who might not typically visit museums and galleries, a reclamation of these cultural spaces as their homes too. Indeed, many of those who visited its previous iterations in Stills, Edinburgh, and Graves Gallery, Sheffield, told Pitts that his exhibition marked their first visit to a white cube.
With posters installed in Peckham and Brixton – communities photographed in this project – The Photographers’ Gallery hoped to reach audiences beyond the Guardian readers who lauded Pitts’ Afropean. The artist, as broadcaster, is equally critical of the need to diversify and pluralise the arts and culture media.
It’s a pleasure to see and experience Pitts’ practice extending into curation. Without seeing into this future, his curators in London could have taken a leaf out of their overlapping exhibition of Evelyn Hofer’s practice, by showing, not telling or labouring, the ‘multicultural working-class’ context of his work. It’s clear, and relevant, to all those who enter the front door.
Johny Pitts: Home is Not a Place was on view at Graves Gallery in Sheffield, Stills in Edinburgh and The Photographers’ Gallery in London. For more, listen to the artist on this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast.
After the End of History: British Working Class Photography, 1989 – 2024, curated by Johny Pitts for Hayward Gallery Touring, is on view at Bonington Gallery in Nottingham until 14 December 2024, and Stills in Edinburgh from 21 March 2025.
Afropean Podcast and Afropean Journal, published by Mörel, will launch on 5 November 2024, to coincide with Paris Photo 2024.
For photographer and writer Johny Pitts, a picture isn’t worth a thousand words. It’s ‘more like a haiku’, something short, which provokes more questions and responses than answers. Sheffield-born and raised, when Pitts moved to Paris post-Brexit, he didn’t think he would ever return to England. It’s a subject grappled with in his best-selling book, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (2019) – for which a companion photobook and podcast, with voices like Kalaf Epalanga, will launch in November 2024. But in 2021, Pitts took his camera and set out with the poet Roger Robinson to answer a different question often posed to him: 'What is Black Britain?'
Starting in London – and Pitts’ current home, in Peckham – the pair travelled clockwise around the coast, from Tilbury to Liverpool, Belfast to Edinburgh. They might have followed train lines, Pitts tells me, but water is more closely linked with historic migration, and flows into our contemporary political landscape of small boats, border crossings, and ‘refugee crises’. Their journey, documented in the recent touring exhibition and book, Home Is Not a Place, crosses similar boundaries of poetry and photography.
Pitts’ photographs challenge the ‘Brixtonisation’ of Blackness, picturing a plurality of everyday experiences. We see Kenya Fried Chicken shops, and COP26 in Scotland, which Pitts’ critiques as an inherently white movement. Travelling in the context of COVID, he remarks how the pandemic actually encouraged many Black people to spend more time in rural, countryside areas – environments from which they are typically excluded.
For Pitts, this is a project ‘from, not about, Black Britain’. His everyday images of ordinary people resist binary media representations of either Black excellence, or criminality. There are no kings or queens, nor staged studio photographs of great African photography in Pitts’ exhibitions. (Those could be found a few stops away on the London Underground, at the Tate Modern exhibition, A World in Common, which ran concurrently with Pitts’ exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2023.) Instead, Pitts’ subjects come ‘consciously uncaptioned’, one of many subtle interventions (and academic interpretations) by curator Karen McQuaid – and one which here works.
There’s some distance between the self-proclaimed self-taught photographer and Home’s most recent place of display at The Photographers’ Gallery. It’s somewhat resolved by the intimate installation, which includes a Living Room and sofa to sit and reflect, and wooden tables, printed with found and family photographs. Titled after James Baldwin’s unfinished play Welcome Table, they’re turned into sites for starting conversations, to be continued beyond the gallery space.
The exhibition’s title also borrows from Baldwin, that ‘home is not a place but an irrevocable condition’; the idea of a poetry-photography collaboration from his fellow Americans, Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava. Home is as much a homage to those who have coloured Pitts’ practice. The walls are papered with archive materials, from early covers of Paul Gilroy’s book, The Black Atlantic (1993), to Konica-branded camera film, exposing a long interest in photography ephemera.
Curated together, they create a sense of timelessness that is deeply rooted in place. Leafing through leather albums from his childhood home in Sheffield, we find shots of Yorkshire puddings and Mount Fuji, gravy boats and GARO-style comic book covers. Indeed, Pitts’ interest in Japan goes far beyond poetry; his father was a Northern Soul musician, invited to travel to Asia with the musical Starlight Express, a bubble to which Pitts returns in his project, Sequel to a Dream: Ghosts of 1980s Japan. Here, we get but a glimpse of the artist’s past, in ‘a fleeting presentation’ of this new work, but it’s a promising look at the future.
Family and community are at the heart of Pitts’ practice; he scarcely represents himself, often playing on his brother’s similar likeness in his other works. Fellow artist Chantal Pitts lends her brother her local pirate radio playlists to soundtrack the space at The Photographers’ Gallery, alongside the tables upon which his photo albums rest.
Home is a warm welcome to those who might not typically visit museums and galleries, a reclamation of these cultural spaces as their homes too. Indeed, many of those who visited its previous iterations in Stills, Edinburgh, and Graves Gallery, Sheffield, told Pitts that his exhibition marked their first visit to a white cube.
With posters installed in Peckham and Brixton – communities photographed in this project – The Photographers’ Gallery hoped to reach audiences beyond the Guardian readers who lauded Pitts’ Afropean. The artist, as broadcaster, is equally critical of the need to diversify and pluralise the arts and culture media.
It’s a pleasure to see and experience Pitts’ practice extending into curation. Without seeing into this future, his curators in London could have taken a leaf out of their overlapping exhibition of Evelyn Hofer’s practice, by showing, not telling or labouring, the ‘multicultural working-class’ context of his work. It’s clear, and relevant, to all those who enter the front door.
Johny Pitts: Home is Not a Place was on view at Graves Gallery in Sheffield, Stills in Edinburgh and The Photographers’ Gallery in London. For more, listen to the artist on this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast.
After the End of History: British Working Class Photography, 1989 – 2024, curated by Johny Pitts for Hayward Gallery Touring, is on view at Bonington Gallery in Nottingham until 14 December 2024, and Stills in Edinburgh from 21 March 2025.
Afropean Podcast and Afropean Journal, published by Mörel, will launch on 5 November 2024, to coincide with Paris Photo 2024.
For photographer and writer Johny Pitts, a picture isn’t worth a thousand words. It’s ‘more like a haiku’, something short, which provokes more questions and responses than answers. Sheffield-born and raised, when Pitts moved to Paris post-Brexit, he didn’t think he would ever return to England. It’s a subject grappled with in his best-selling book, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (2019) – for which a companion photobook and podcast, with voices like Kalaf Epalanga, will launch in November 2024. But in 2021, Pitts took his camera and set out with the poet Roger Robinson to answer a different question often posed to him: 'What is Black Britain?'
Starting in London – and Pitts’ current home, in Peckham – the pair travelled clockwise around the coast, from Tilbury to Liverpool, Belfast to Edinburgh. They might have followed train lines, Pitts tells me, but water is more closely linked with historic migration, and flows into our contemporary political landscape of small boats, border crossings, and ‘refugee crises’. Their journey, documented in the recent touring exhibition and book, Home Is Not a Place, crosses similar boundaries of poetry and photography.
Pitts’ photographs challenge the ‘Brixtonisation’ of Blackness, picturing a plurality of everyday experiences. We see Kenya Fried Chicken shops, and COP26 in Scotland, which Pitts’ critiques as an inherently white movement. Travelling in the context of COVID, he remarks how the pandemic actually encouraged many Black people to spend more time in rural, countryside areas – environments from which they are typically excluded.
For Pitts, this is a project ‘from, not about, Black Britain’. His everyday images of ordinary people resist binary media representations of either Black excellence, or criminality. There are no kings or queens, nor staged studio photographs of great African photography in Pitts’ exhibitions. (Those could be found a few stops away on the London Underground, at the Tate Modern exhibition, A World in Common, which ran concurrently with Pitts’ exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2023.) Instead, Pitts’ subjects come ‘consciously uncaptioned’, one of many subtle interventions (and academic interpretations) by curator Karen McQuaid – and one which here works.
There’s some distance between the self-proclaimed self-taught photographer and Home’s most recent place of display at The Photographers’ Gallery. It’s somewhat resolved by the intimate installation, which includes a Living Room and sofa to sit and reflect, and wooden tables, printed with found and family photographs. Titled after James Baldwin’s unfinished play Welcome Table, they’re turned into sites for starting conversations, to be continued beyond the gallery space.
The exhibition’s title also borrows from Baldwin, that ‘home is not a place but an irrevocable condition’; the idea of a poetry-photography collaboration from his fellow Americans, Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava. Home is as much a homage to those who have coloured Pitts’ practice. The walls are papered with archive materials, from early covers of Paul Gilroy’s book, The Black Atlantic (1993), to Konica-branded camera film, exposing a long interest in photography ephemera.
Curated together, they create a sense of timelessness that is deeply rooted in place. Leafing through leather albums from his childhood home in Sheffield, we find shots of Yorkshire puddings and Mount Fuji, gravy boats and GARO-style comic book covers. Indeed, Pitts’ interest in Japan goes far beyond poetry; his father was a Northern Soul musician, invited to travel to Asia with the musical Starlight Express, a bubble to which Pitts returns in his project, Sequel to a Dream: Ghosts of 1980s Japan. Here, we get but a glimpse of the artist’s past, in ‘a fleeting presentation’ of this new work, but it’s a promising look at the future.
Family and community are at the heart of Pitts’ practice; he scarcely represents himself, often playing on his brother’s similar likeness in his other works. Fellow artist Chantal Pitts lends her brother her local pirate radio playlists to soundtrack the space at The Photographers’ Gallery, alongside the tables upon which his photo albums rest.
Home is a warm welcome to those who might not typically visit museums and galleries, a reclamation of these cultural spaces as their homes too. Indeed, many of those who visited its previous iterations in Stills, Edinburgh, and Graves Gallery, Sheffield, told Pitts that his exhibition marked their first visit to a white cube.
With posters installed in Peckham and Brixton – communities photographed in this project – The Photographers’ Gallery hoped to reach audiences beyond the Guardian readers who lauded Pitts’ Afropean. The artist, as broadcaster, is equally critical of the need to diversify and pluralise the arts and culture media.
It’s a pleasure to see and experience Pitts’ practice extending into curation. Without seeing into this future, his curators in London could have taken a leaf out of their overlapping exhibition of Evelyn Hofer’s practice, by showing, not telling or labouring, the ‘multicultural working-class’ context of his work. It’s clear, and relevant, to all those who enter the front door.
Johny Pitts: Home is Not a Place was on view at Graves Gallery in Sheffield, Stills in Edinburgh and The Photographers’ Gallery in London. For more, listen to the artist on this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast.
After the End of History: British Working Class Photography, 1989 – 2024, curated by Johny Pitts for Hayward Gallery Touring, is on view at Bonington Gallery in Nottingham until 14 December 2024, and Stills in Edinburgh from 21 March 2025.
Afropean Podcast and Afropean Journal, published by Mörel, will launch on 5 November 2024, to coincide with Paris Photo 2024.
For photographer and writer Johny Pitts, a picture isn’t worth a thousand words. It’s ‘more like a haiku’, something short, which provokes more questions and responses than answers. Sheffield-born and raised, when Pitts moved to Paris post-Brexit, he didn’t think he would ever return to England. It’s a subject grappled with in his best-selling book, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (2019) – for which a companion photobook and podcast, with voices like Kalaf Epalanga, will launch in November 2024. But in 2021, Pitts took his camera and set out with the poet Roger Robinson to answer a different question often posed to him: 'What is Black Britain?'
Starting in London – and Pitts’ current home, in Peckham – the pair travelled clockwise around the coast, from Tilbury to Liverpool, Belfast to Edinburgh. They might have followed train lines, Pitts tells me, but water is more closely linked with historic migration, and flows into our contemporary political landscape of small boats, border crossings, and ‘refugee crises’. Their journey, documented in the recent touring exhibition and book, Home Is Not a Place, crosses similar boundaries of poetry and photography.
Pitts’ photographs challenge the ‘Brixtonisation’ of Blackness, picturing a plurality of everyday experiences. We see Kenya Fried Chicken shops, and COP26 in Scotland, which Pitts’ critiques as an inherently white movement. Travelling in the context of COVID, he remarks how the pandemic actually encouraged many Black people to spend more time in rural, countryside areas – environments from which they are typically excluded.
For Pitts, this is a project ‘from, not about, Black Britain’. His everyday images of ordinary people resist binary media representations of either Black excellence, or criminality. There are no kings or queens, nor staged studio photographs of great African photography in Pitts’ exhibitions. (Those could be found a few stops away on the London Underground, at the Tate Modern exhibition, A World in Common, which ran concurrently with Pitts’ exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2023.) Instead, Pitts’ subjects come ‘consciously uncaptioned’, one of many subtle interventions (and academic interpretations) by curator Karen McQuaid – and one which here works.
There’s some distance between the self-proclaimed self-taught photographer and Home’s most recent place of display at The Photographers’ Gallery. It’s somewhat resolved by the intimate installation, which includes a Living Room and sofa to sit and reflect, and wooden tables, printed with found and family photographs. Titled after James Baldwin’s unfinished play Welcome Table, they’re turned into sites for starting conversations, to be continued beyond the gallery space.
The exhibition’s title also borrows from Baldwin, that ‘home is not a place but an irrevocable condition’; the idea of a poetry-photography collaboration from his fellow Americans, Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava. Home is as much a homage to those who have coloured Pitts’ practice. The walls are papered with archive materials, from early covers of Paul Gilroy’s book, The Black Atlantic (1993), to Konica-branded camera film, exposing a long interest in photography ephemera.
Curated together, they create a sense of timelessness that is deeply rooted in place. Leafing through leather albums from his childhood home in Sheffield, we find shots of Yorkshire puddings and Mount Fuji, gravy boats and GARO-style comic book covers. Indeed, Pitts’ interest in Japan goes far beyond poetry; his father was a Northern Soul musician, invited to travel to Asia with the musical Starlight Express, a bubble to which Pitts returns in his project, Sequel to a Dream: Ghosts of 1980s Japan. Here, we get but a glimpse of the artist’s past, in ‘a fleeting presentation’ of this new work, but it’s a promising look at the future.
Family and community are at the heart of Pitts’ practice; he scarcely represents himself, often playing on his brother’s similar likeness in his other works. Fellow artist Chantal Pitts lends her brother her local pirate radio playlists to soundtrack the space at The Photographers’ Gallery, alongside the tables upon which his photo albums rest.
Home is a warm welcome to those who might not typically visit museums and galleries, a reclamation of these cultural spaces as their homes too. Indeed, many of those who visited its previous iterations in Stills, Edinburgh, and Graves Gallery, Sheffield, told Pitts that his exhibition marked their first visit to a white cube.
With posters installed in Peckham and Brixton – communities photographed in this project – The Photographers’ Gallery hoped to reach audiences beyond the Guardian readers who lauded Pitts’ Afropean. The artist, as broadcaster, is equally critical of the need to diversify and pluralise the arts and culture media.
It’s a pleasure to see and experience Pitts’ practice extending into curation. Without seeing into this future, his curators in London could have taken a leaf out of their overlapping exhibition of Evelyn Hofer’s practice, by showing, not telling or labouring, the ‘multicultural working-class’ context of his work. It’s clear, and relevant, to all those who enter the front door.
Johny Pitts: Home is Not a Place was on view at Graves Gallery in Sheffield, Stills in Edinburgh and The Photographers’ Gallery in London. For more, listen to the artist on this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast.
After the End of History: British Working Class Photography, 1989 – 2024, curated by Johny Pitts for Hayward Gallery Touring, is on view at Bonington Gallery in Nottingham until 14 December 2024, and Stills in Edinburgh from 21 March 2025.
Afropean Podcast and Afropean Journal, published by Mörel, will launch on 5 November 2024, to coincide with Paris Photo 2024.
For photographer and writer Johny Pitts, a picture isn’t worth a thousand words. It’s ‘more like a haiku’, something short, which provokes more questions and responses than answers. Sheffield-born and raised, when Pitts moved to Paris post-Brexit, he didn’t think he would ever return to England. It’s a subject grappled with in his best-selling book, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (2019) – for which a companion photobook and podcast, with voices like Kalaf Epalanga, will launch in November 2024. But in 2021, Pitts took his camera and set out with the poet Roger Robinson to answer a different question often posed to him: 'What is Black Britain?'
Starting in London – and Pitts’ current home, in Peckham – the pair travelled clockwise around the coast, from Tilbury to Liverpool, Belfast to Edinburgh. They might have followed train lines, Pitts tells me, but water is more closely linked with historic migration, and flows into our contemporary political landscape of small boats, border crossings, and ‘refugee crises’. Their journey, documented in the recent touring exhibition and book, Home Is Not a Place, crosses similar boundaries of poetry and photography.
Pitts’ photographs challenge the ‘Brixtonisation’ of Blackness, picturing a plurality of everyday experiences. We see Kenya Fried Chicken shops, and COP26 in Scotland, which Pitts’ critiques as an inherently white movement. Travelling in the context of COVID, he remarks how the pandemic actually encouraged many Black people to spend more time in rural, countryside areas – environments from which they are typically excluded.
For Pitts, this is a project ‘from, not about, Black Britain’. His everyday images of ordinary people resist binary media representations of either Black excellence, or criminality. There are no kings or queens, nor staged studio photographs of great African photography in Pitts’ exhibitions. (Those could be found a few stops away on the London Underground, at the Tate Modern exhibition, A World in Common, which ran concurrently with Pitts’ exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2023.) Instead, Pitts’ subjects come ‘consciously uncaptioned’, one of many subtle interventions (and academic interpretations) by curator Karen McQuaid – and one which here works.
There’s some distance between the self-proclaimed self-taught photographer and Home’s most recent place of display at The Photographers’ Gallery. It’s somewhat resolved by the intimate installation, which includes a Living Room and sofa to sit and reflect, and wooden tables, printed with found and family photographs. Titled after James Baldwin’s unfinished play Welcome Table, they’re turned into sites for starting conversations, to be continued beyond the gallery space.
The exhibition’s title also borrows from Baldwin, that ‘home is not a place but an irrevocable condition’; the idea of a poetry-photography collaboration from his fellow Americans, Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava. Home is as much a homage to those who have coloured Pitts’ practice. The walls are papered with archive materials, from early covers of Paul Gilroy’s book, The Black Atlantic (1993), to Konica-branded camera film, exposing a long interest in photography ephemera.
Curated together, they create a sense of timelessness that is deeply rooted in place. Leafing through leather albums from his childhood home in Sheffield, we find shots of Yorkshire puddings and Mount Fuji, gravy boats and GARO-style comic book covers. Indeed, Pitts’ interest in Japan goes far beyond poetry; his father was a Northern Soul musician, invited to travel to Asia with the musical Starlight Express, a bubble to which Pitts returns in his project, Sequel to a Dream: Ghosts of 1980s Japan. Here, we get but a glimpse of the artist’s past, in ‘a fleeting presentation’ of this new work, but it’s a promising look at the future.
Family and community are at the heart of Pitts’ practice; he scarcely represents himself, often playing on his brother’s similar likeness in his other works. Fellow artist Chantal Pitts lends her brother her local pirate radio playlists to soundtrack the space at The Photographers’ Gallery, alongside the tables upon which his photo albums rest.
Home is a warm welcome to those who might not typically visit museums and galleries, a reclamation of these cultural spaces as their homes too. Indeed, many of those who visited its previous iterations in Stills, Edinburgh, and Graves Gallery, Sheffield, told Pitts that his exhibition marked their first visit to a white cube.
With posters installed in Peckham and Brixton – communities photographed in this project – The Photographers’ Gallery hoped to reach audiences beyond the Guardian readers who lauded Pitts’ Afropean. The artist, as broadcaster, is equally critical of the need to diversify and pluralise the arts and culture media.
It’s a pleasure to see and experience Pitts’ practice extending into curation. Without seeing into this future, his curators in London could have taken a leaf out of their overlapping exhibition of Evelyn Hofer’s practice, by showing, not telling or labouring, the ‘multicultural working-class’ context of his work. It’s clear, and relevant, to all those who enter the front door.
Johny Pitts: Home is Not a Place was on view at Graves Gallery in Sheffield, Stills in Edinburgh and The Photographers’ Gallery in London. For more, listen to the artist on this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast.
After the End of History: British Working Class Photography, 1989 – 2024, curated by Johny Pitts for Hayward Gallery Touring, is on view at Bonington Gallery in Nottingham until 14 December 2024, and Stills in Edinburgh from 21 March 2025.
Afropean Podcast and Afropean Journal, published by Mörel, will launch on 5 November 2024, to coincide with Paris Photo 2024.
For photographer and writer Johny Pitts, a picture isn’t worth a thousand words. It’s ‘more like a haiku’, something short, which provokes more questions and responses than answers. Sheffield-born and raised, when Pitts moved to Paris post-Brexit, he didn’t think he would ever return to England. It’s a subject grappled with in his best-selling book, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (2019) – for which a companion photobook and podcast, with voices like Kalaf Epalanga, will launch in November 2024. But in 2021, Pitts took his camera and set out with the poet Roger Robinson to answer a different question often posed to him: 'What is Black Britain?'
Starting in London – and Pitts’ current home, in Peckham – the pair travelled clockwise around the coast, from Tilbury to Liverpool, Belfast to Edinburgh. They might have followed train lines, Pitts tells me, but water is more closely linked with historic migration, and flows into our contemporary political landscape of small boats, border crossings, and ‘refugee crises’. Their journey, documented in the recent touring exhibition and book, Home Is Not a Place, crosses similar boundaries of poetry and photography.
Pitts’ photographs challenge the ‘Brixtonisation’ of Blackness, picturing a plurality of everyday experiences. We see Kenya Fried Chicken shops, and COP26 in Scotland, which Pitts’ critiques as an inherently white movement. Travelling in the context of COVID, he remarks how the pandemic actually encouraged many Black people to spend more time in rural, countryside areas – environments from which they are typically excluded.
For Pitts, this is a project ‘from, not about, Black Britain’. His everyday images of ordinary people resist binary media representations of either Black excellence, or criminality. There are no kings or queens, nor staged studio photographs of great African photography in Pitts’ exhibitions. (Those could be found a few stops away on the London Underground, at the Tate Modern exhibition, A World in Common, which ran concurrently with Pitts’ exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2023.) Instead, Pitts’ subjects come ‘consciously uncaptioned’, one of many subtle interventions (and academic interpretations) by curator Karen McQuaid – and one which here works.
There’s some distance between the self-proclaimed self-taught photographer and Home’s most recent place of display at The Photographers’ Gallery. It’s somewhat resolved by the intimate installation, which includes a Living Room and sofa to sit and reflect, and wooden tables, printed with found and family photographs. Titled after James Baldwin’s unfinished play Welcome Table, they’re turned into sites for starting conversations, to be continued beyond the gallery space.
The exhibition’s title also borrows from Baldwin, that ‘home is not a place but an irrevocable condition’; the idea of a poetry-photography collaboration from his fellow Americans, Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava. Home is as much a homage to those who have coloured Pitts’ practice. The walls are papered with archive materials, from early covers of Paul Gilroy’s book, The Black Atlantic (1993), to Konica-branded camera film, exposing a long interest in photography ephemera.
Curated together, they create a sense of timelessness that is deeply rooted in place. Leafing through leather albums from his childhood home in Sheffield, we find shots of Yorkshire puddings and Mount Fuji, gravy boats and GARO-style comic book covers. Indeed, Pitts’ interest in Japan goes far beyond poetry; his father was a Northern Soul musician, invited to travel to Asia with the musical Starlight Express, a bubble to which Pitts returns in his project, Sequel to a Dream: Ghosts of 1980s Japan. Here, we get but a glimpse of the artist’s past, in ‘a fleeting presentation’ of this new work, but it’s a promising look at the future.
Family and community are at the heart of Pitts’ practice; he scarcely represents himself, often playing on his brother’s similar likeness in his other works. Fellow artist Chantal Pitts lends her brother her local pirate radio playlists to soundtrack the space at The Photographers’ Gallery, alongside the tables upon which his photo albums rest.
Home is a warm welcome to those who might not typically visit museums and galleries, a reclamation of these cultural spaces as their homes too. Indeed, many of those who visited its previous iterations in Stills, Edinburgh, and Graves Gallery, Sheffield, told Pitts that his exhibition marked their first visit to a white cube.
With posters installed in Peckham and Brixton – communities photographed in this project – The Photographers’ Gallery hoped to reach audiences beyond the Guardian readers who lauded Pitts’ Afropean. The artist, as broadcaster, is equally critical of the need to diversify and pluralise the arts and culture media.
It’s a pleasure to see and experience Pitts’ practice extending into curation. Without seeing into this future, his curators in London could have taken a leaf out of their overlapping exhibition of Evelyn Hofer’s practice, by showing, not telling or labouring, the ‘multicultural working-class’ context of his work. It’s clear, and relevant, to all those who enter the front door.
Johny Pitts: Home is Not a Place was on view at Graves Gallery in Sheffield, Stills in Edinburgh and The Photographers’ Gallery in London. For more, listen to the artist on this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast.
After the End of History: British Working Class Photography, 1989 – 2024, curated by Johny Pitts for Hayward Gallery Touring, is on view at Bonington Gallery in Nottingham until 14 December 2024, and Stills in Edinburgh from 21 March 2025.
Afropean Podcast and Afropean Journal, published by Mörel, will launch on 5 November 2024, to coincide with Paris Photo 2024.
For photographer and writer Johny Pitts, a picture isn’t worth a thousand words. It’s ‘more like a haiku’, something short, which provokes more questions and responses than answers. Sheffield-born and raised, when Pitts moved to Paris post-Brexit, he didn’t think he would ever return to England. It’s a subject grappled with in his best-selling book, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (2019) – for which a companion photobook and podcast, with voices like Kalaf Epalanga, will launch in November 2024. But in 2021, Pitts took his camera and set out with the poet Roger Robinson to answer a different question often posed to him: 'What is Black Britain?'
Starting in London – and Pitts’ current home, in Peckham – the pair travelled clockwise around the coast, from Tilbury to Liverpool, Belfast to Edinburgh. They might have followed train lines, Pitts tells me, but water is more closely linked with historic migration, and flows into our contemporary political landscape of small boats, border crossings, and ‘refugee crises’. Their journey, documented in the recent touring exhibition and book, Home Is Not a Place, crosses similar boundaries of poetry and photography.
Pitts’ photographs challenge the ‘Brixtonisation’ of Blackness, picturing a plurality of everyday experiences. We see Kenya Fried Chicken shops, and COP26 in Scotland, which Pitts’ critiques as an inherently white movement. Travelling in the context of COVID, he remarks how the pandemic actually encouraged many Black people to spend more time in rural, countryside areas – environments from which they are typically excluded.
For Pitts, this is a project ‘from, not about, Black Britain’. His everyday images of ordinary people resist binary media representations of either Black excellence, or criminality. There are no kings or queens, nor staged studio photographs of great African photography in Pitts’ exhibitions. (Those could be found a few stops away on the London Underground, at the Tate Modern exhibition, A World in Common, which ran concurrently with Pitts’ exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2023.) Instead, Pitts’ subjects come ‘consciously uncaptioned’, one of many subtle interventions (and academic interpretations) by curator Karen McQuaid – and one which here works.
There’s some distance between the self-proclaimed self-taught photographer and Home’s most recent place of display at The Photographers’ Gallery. It’s somewhat resolved by the intimate installation, which includes a Living Room and sofa to sit and reflect, and wooden tables, printed with found and family photographs. Titled after James Baldwin’s unfinished play Welcome Table, they’re turned into sites for starting conversations, to be continued beyond the gallery space.
The exhibition’s title also borrows from Baldwin, that ‘home is not a place but an irrevocable condition’; the idea of a poetry-photography collaboration from his fellow Americans, Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava. Home is as much a homage to those who have coloured Pitts’ practice. The walls are papered with archive materials, from early covers of Paul Gilroy’s book, The Black Atlantic (1993), to Konica-branded camera film, exposing a long interest in photography ephemera.
Curated together, they create a sense of timelessness that is deeply rooted in place. Leafing through leather albums from his childhood home in Sheffield, we find shots of Yorkshire puddings and Mount Fuji, gravy boats and GARO-style comic book covers. Indeed, Pitts’ interest in Japan goes far beyond poetry; his father was a Northern Soul musician, invited to travel to Asia with the musical Starlight Express, a bubble to which Pitts returns in his project, Sequel to a Dream: Ghosts of 1980s Japan. Here, we get but a glimpse of the artist’s past, in ‘a fleeting presentation’ of this new work, but it’s a promising look at the future.
Family and community are at the heart of Pitts’ practice; he scarcely represents himself, often playing on his brother’s similar likeness in his other works. Fellow artist Chantal Pitts lends her brother her local pirate radio playlists to soundtrack the space at The Photographers’ Gallery, alongside the tables upon which his photo albums rest.
Home is a warm welcome to those who might not typically visit museums and galleries, a reclamation of these cultural spaces as their homes too. Indeed, many of those who visited its previous iterations in Stills, Edinburgh, and Graves Gallery, Sheffield, told Pitts that his exhibition marked their first visit to a white cube.
With posters installed in Peckham and Brixton – communities photographed in this project – The Photographers’ Gallery hoped to reach audiences beyond the Guardian readers who lauded Pitts’ Afropean. The artist, as broadcaster, is equally critical of the need to diversify and pluralise the arts and culture media.
It’s a pleasure to see and experience Pitts’ practice extending into curation. Without seeing into this future, his curators in London could have taken a leaf out of their overlapping exhibition of Evelyn Hofer’s practice, by showing, not telling or labouring, the ‘multicultural working-class’ context of his work. It’s clear, and relevant, to all those who enter the front door.
Johny Pitts: Home is Not a Place was on view at Graves Gallery in Sheffield, Stills in Edinburgh and The Photographers’ Gallery in London. For more, listen to the artist on this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast.
After the End of History: British Working Class Photography, 1989 – 2024, curated by Johny Pitts for Hayward Gallery Touring, is on view at Bonington Gallery in Nottingham until 14 December 2024, and Stills in Edinburgh from 21 March 2025.
Afropean Podcast and Afropean Journal, published by Mörel, will launch on 5 November 2024, to coincide with Paris Photo 2024.
