Seeing oneself written into British and European history: Johny Pitts and the peripheral “black document”
Born in Sheffield in the 1980s, in a dual-heritage working-class family, Johny Pitts came to fame in 2019 with the publication of Afropean: Notes on Black Europe. His black and white photographs illustrated “the under-documented areas of Europe that often contradict the homogenized monocultured depi...
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| Pubblicato in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/angles, |
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| Autore principale: | |
| Natura: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Lingua: | Anglais |
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Angles
2025
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| Accesso online: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Riassunto: | Born in Sheffield in the 1980s, in a dual-heritage working-class family, Johny Pitts came to fame in 2019 with the publication of Afropean: Notes on Black Europe. His black and white photographs illustrated “the under-documented areas of Europe that often contradict the homogenized monocultured depictions suggested by tourist boards and pocket-sized travel guides”. Pitts’ intention to focus on the “beauty in black banality” departed from what he identified as the more common presentation of Black people in Europe as “über-stylized retro hipster dandies in thick-rimmed glasses and a bit of kente cloth, or dangerous hooded ghetto-yoot”. In 2022, Pitts’ first UK solo exhibition Home is Not a Place opened in Sheffield. The accompanying book, a collaboration with the poet Roger Robinson, was selected as one of The Guardian’s Best Books of the Year. The series is based on “casual images” from Pitts’ personal archive, rediscovered under lockdown, to which he added new ones, taken on the move. Moving away from Tilbury, where The Empire Windrush docked in 1948, and is “too often (…) where the history told about Black Britain begins and ends”, the black northerner, frustrated by what he sometimes calls the “Brixtonization of black Britain” (the reduction of the Black British experience into a single, neat, London-oriented narrative) followed the coastline, finding not only “Black people, but the history of Empire and transatlantic slavery to which every Briton is tethered; stories of arrival, asylum and deportation, and of that inverted, imaginative unit of history and geography known as ‘The Black Atlantic’”. In 2024, he published the extended colour scrapbook-like version of his 2019 travelogue, Afropean: A Journal, with the subtitle “Images, Notes and Ephemera from Black Europe 2004-2024”. This article looks at Johny Pitts’ photobooks as attempts at recovering a forgotten history of the Black presence in both the UK and Europe, a visual story told from the social and geographical periphery, “kente cloth in fog” where past and present meet. The analysis first focuses on Pitts’ visibilisation of a Black British and Black European history based on artistic filiation across the Black Atlantic and within the UK and Europe, before moving on to his definition of a ‘B-Side aesthetics’ relying on the Black working class and vernacular photography. The reflection ends on Pitts’ art as photography on the edge of (happy) failure, and his attempt at creating an (im)perfect Black archive |
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