“For me, home is like vibration,” says the photographer Johnny Pitts I will explain. “It doesn’t sound like New Age, but home is a feeling. Most of all, it’s the people around you…your friends, your family, and your community. I had this idea in a certain part of Sheffield where everyone has left home, so every time I come home it doesn’t feel like home anymore because there are no people there to call home.”
Reflecting on this diffuse concept of home, and how it intersects with identity, community and memory, is at the heart of the acclaimed photographer’s latest project. Home is Not a Place – Traveling exhibitions and books (published by Harper Collins).collaboration with a poet Roger Robinsonthe pair spent a year together in a Mini Cooper, traveling the British coastline, Black british culture.
In a conversation on Zoom, Pitts explained: Britain is so strange and formless. And the concept of blackness is actually a very abstract concept, and trying to apply it to landscapes is difficult. But I could try to tell interesting stories that are perhaps left out of the British consciousness, and even the black consciousness in some ways.
Departing from London, along the Thames to the sea, their tour goes from Margate to Land’s End, Glasgow and John O’Groats The History and Stories of Black Britons. “I felt that a trip needed an itinerary. Paul Graham’s book A1: Great North Road (1983) tells a very coherent story of Britain, photographically, just by looking at this one road,” Pitts tells Dazed. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we go round the coast?'” and head to Tilbury, where Empire his Windrush anchored. That’s usually where the story of Black Britain begins and ends, but of course there was a black community before Empire Windrush arrived, and there’s a black community based in the UK now. So we kept going clockwise around the coast to tell that story… Somali dockers in Bristol, Liverpool, Cardiff, all these stories come up. “
Below, Johnny Pitts shares the situation for one particular image. Home is Not a PlaceThis photo (shown below) holds special meaning for photographers. The photographer explains in his own words why he felt compelled to pick up the camera to capture this particular scene of everyday life, and how it encapsulates the complexity of Britain. I’m here.
“Konica often appears in my work, and I use it as a memorable logo or motif. I remember living in Japan with my parents when I was a child, and they always used Konica films. I remember this commercial that said, “Konica’s colors are calling me.” This wildly exuberant 20th-century optimism of hers didn’t pan out. I think Konica demonstrates this failed optimism. This globalization has morphed into something else. But Konica, through its color her wheel logo, looks like a story of unity and promised the 21st century to be multicultural bliss.
“This is one of the few photos from our coastal trip that was well researched beforehand. When I was hanging out in Gillingham and saw this huge Kodak sign, I couldn’t believe it. 2000s It’s a photo studio that’s been out of business since a few times I went back and figured out how to take pictures, and it turned out that it was very often members of the black community who were using it, especially those from West Africa who were coming in. I found myself taking passport photos, and it made me think about the concept of borders.
“I waited the longest before I saw this couple. The guy was waiting outside and I saw her come out. When I took the image, I was like, ‘ I was like, oh my god, that’s the image. I approached them and said, ‘I took a picture of you. Do you mind? Can I use it?
“Outside the big cities there is this other UK with its own colors and its own challenges… I wanted to capture some of the British hinterland” – Johnny Pitts
“If you look closely, you can see it says ‘Premier Imaging Center in Kent.’ What I’m thinking is the images taken because there are still these clinical photography labs all over India and places in Africa I like the fact that this is the UK now but it could also be Lagos It shows how complicated this country is, and I think that’s why it really resonated with me.
“Outside the big cities, there is another UK with its own colors and its own challenges. After 10 years of austerity and the coronavirus, it’s like a dead boulevard…gamblers, Poundland.It’s amazing how many such places there are when you leave London. I think they wanted to shoot the interior of England, towns and boulevards.
“These landscapes are so ephemeral that I wanted to capture some of the independent commerce that still clings and tries to survive. Westminster homes, all the stories they suggest, will be preserved for centuries.These little places, important not only to the black community, but to working-class people, are not always preserved. No. So I feel it’s important to document these spaces while they’re still here.
“These landscapes are very ephemeral…which is why I feel it is important to document these spaces while they are still here.” – Johnny Pitts
“It is important not only to shoot people, but when you shoot people, it is important that the background also suggests something, and you can think about the layers and spaces in which these hidden histories took place. t always show them clearly.The great thing about taking pictures is that you can ponder and observe them carefully.They are like fragments of the past that are sometimes buried in history. But if you look closely, there are still echoes left, and capturing those echoes is all I do.”
home is not a place The work by Johnny Pitts and Roger Robinson will be published by Harper Collins in late September 2022.Exhibition by Johnny Pitts [commissioned by Photoworks for the inaugural Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship] It will be on display from 11 August to 24 December 2022 at the Graves Gallery at Sheffield Art Gallery and from 9 March to 10 June 2023 at the Stills Gallery in Edinburgh.
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