Johny Pitts: Home Is Not a Place Interview with Olivia Simone
In 2021, photographer Johny Pitts and poet Roger Robinson embarked on a journey around Britain’s coastline, documenting the everydayness of Black British communities. In capturing the inbetweeness of Black British life, Pitts and Robinson create a moving, sensory idea of home that exists beyond the tangible.
Here, Johny meets with founder and editor of Breadfruit, Olivia Simone, to discuss his exhibition Home Is Not A Place.
You explain that this exhibition is “rooted in, but not restricted by, Blackness” and discuss the idea that multiculturalism is a part of Blackness. Could you elaborate on what that means to you and the place of multiculturalism in Black Britain?
I’m always interested in how the Black experience very often deals with the counterintuitive. People from outside the community have a monolithic idea of what Blackness is and sometimes the Black community has had to create a monolithic political identity in order to move forward, but it’s important not to forget all the solidarities that have been made within that. I see Blackness as a space of multiculturalism, and this is something that nobody really talks about. I was raised on anime and Hong Kong cinema with the Yemeni community – there were Jamaican kids, Somalian kids, Yemeni kids, and we were all kind of seen as the dregs of society and so we created our own culture. Growing up in Sheffield, I was around the cousin of legendary boxer, Prince Naseem Hamed, and I always found it really interesting when he’d win a fight because he’d speak in this mix of broad Yorkshire with African American Ebonics with Patois and then Praise Allah for the win – his post fight speeches encompass my culture completely. When you think of a crew like Wu Tang Clan and how they used Hong Kong martial art films in their Hip Hop, it shows that we’re always on the look out for the counterintuitive and that’s really what I wanted to explore. I wanted to investigate what I call ‘taking Blackness out of its comfort zone’ because we occasionally live in these tropes that are put on us, but actually within the community we’re so complex and beautiful and sometimes surreal and I wanted to capture a bit of that in the exhibition.
“I’m always interested in how the Black experience very often deals with the counterintuitive”
You mention that the Black community has sometimes felt a need to create a monolithic political identity – do you ever think about how Black people, especially young people, can take a step back from these singular, rigid identities?
Yeah, it’s difficult now. In some ways there are loads of opportunities with access to the world via the internet and in other ways it can cause confirmation bias and we all end up living in our own internet bubbles; we have to find ways to really kick against that. I always try to consider things that can slip between the algorithms. I believe the way to do that is to really be in tune with the landscape around us and pay attention. That’s something that I did from a young age – I didn't even know I was doing it – I was just always interested in the corner shop and the feeling and mood of it and its different, random elements. I think Black life can be a bit like a mix tape. Especially growing up in the 90s, you kind of used whatever ingredients you had and you’d try and make it dope. It reminds me of this Erykah Badu lyric where she says, “my dress costs $4 but I made it fly” and I love that. That idea that whatever you have at your disposal you can make something out of it, which I suppose is where a lot of Black genius has come from. A lot of great Hip Hop came from people who had nothing and created something out of nothing. So making sure you’re in tune with what’s around you and never being embarrassed of where you’re from is important. To really look at it aesthetically and think of how amazing it is that it exists despite the worst odds. Especially in a city like London, where people are being priced out and everything’s so expensive… yet people are still surviving and creating and that to me is amazing. It’s genius.
So the title of the exhibition refers to home not being a physical place and, instead of a material place, I felt a great sense of movement in your photographs. It made me think how – and relating to what you just said about people being priced out and surviving – moving has been a real part of Blackness and Black lives in this country. Do you feel that we’ve had to make home less of a physical place because movement has played such a key role in our survival?
I think so – I think there’s a big problem with the legacy of Black ownership. Take the Skiddy Centre, for example – Linton Kwesi Johnson often talks about it – it was owned by a Trinidadian artist and then lost. Some of the physical spaces that were owned by the Black community never felt as set in stone as other communities, and so I think people get used to having to be a little bit flexible with their lives and just make the best out of a situation. That’s not something that you’d aim for – you want people to be able to afford houses but on the flip side, as philosopher Jean Paul Sartre says, ‘the winner loses and the loser wins.’ Sometimes, when you’re on the losing side it offers you opportunities for growth and building skills and strengths. Let’s say a person is from a family with loads of money and grew up in Hampstead, I actually wouldn’t change places with them, you know what I mean? I appreciate how nice that must be but I feel that life has given me more from being on the edges a little bit. Again, it’s not a goal but you gotta embrace it as part of the journey.
Going back to when you mentioned attention to detail, that’s something I also really notice in this exhibition. The beaded curtain, the VHS, the mix tapes… everything here feels so familiar. The whole space seems to capture an exact moment in time and feel equally timeless. What made you wanna create this living room installation?
It was important for me to think of the different visual language that I emerged from. Cause I didn't go to art school or anything like that a lot of the visual learning I did was in the home, in family albums; that kind of aesthetic. It was through the handmade designs of my sister’s mix tapes and I didn’t wanna lose sight of that. I wanted to elevate it in a sense, to really embrace and celebrate those kind of different visuals that I grew up with and try and bring them into the gallery space, to take over the gallery in a way. I mentioned earlier that Frantz Fanon quote where he explains that ‘each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover their mission, then fulfil it, or betray it,’ and I feel really happy to be in my late 30s and for this to be from my generation. I hope to try and transmit what I grew up with onto a younger generation so they have a sense of history and an alternative working class Black archive to delve into. Even though they might not have grown up with VHS tapes, to know that this is part of their history and to think about it is important. I’ve been reading this cultural theorist, Mark Fischer, and he said something really interesting about Channel 4. In the early 90s, my mum and dad and brother and sister made all these recordings of Channel 4 and on it you’d get a social realism movie then a documentary about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan an amazing Pakistani singer, then Hong Kong cinema and something about Tarkovsky, and Channel 4 went from that to rich people selling homes, and so we lost all of this culture. You can watch all these VHS tapes here in the gallery and I wanted to show how things can slip through the cracks – as a kid watching TV you could learn something and there was a great mix in all that you could watch. You have a documentary here about Black performers in Harlem next to Ken Loach and that kind of mad mix of ideas is so important and that’s what I wanted to transmit through this display. All these different ingredients can add to a really interesting and fulfilling cultural life.
That concept of having a cultural life full of diverse ideas and thought feels really present in the photographs as well – because you don’t include anyone’s names or professions everyone feels on the same level. It feels like the variety of perspectives and realities they bring, captured in the photographs, are of equal value and contribute to this rich cultural life that you speak of.
Yes – I’ve actually always been interested in trying to remove hierarchy in a certain way. This table here was actually made by my sister and it’s based upon some ideas from James Baldwin. Baldwin would just – and it became a bit of a problem at times – welcome anyone into his home. He’d have the local gigolo speaking with Miles Davis and Maya Angelou and so many others, yet there’d be this reduced hierarchy around his table. People were simply having discussions. I try and do something similar with the live events that I put on, where everyone’s on the same level, the audience participate, and we really tap into the genius of the room. What we have here, in the exhibition, is members of the Black community who teach at Yale, we have award winning musicians, former Lord Mayors, and they’re mixed in with the person who’s sweeping the street – by not naming the images you're able to look at all these contributions as equal. There’s this lyric – ‘scuse my language – by Mos Def that I always work from and he says, “there’s never no inbetween we’re either niggas or kings, we’re either bitches or queens”. I’m always looking for that inbetweenness, that everydayness, and trying to democratise and remove the hierarchies. Especially within Black photography, there’s a big tradition of celebrating ‘kings’ and I sort of wanna get away from that. For me, you don’t have to be a king to be in my pictures, you can be a regular person. To be honest, I’m actually against the monarchy as well so even the language that is used makes me wanna move away from this. I wanna go beyond showing people in their Sunday best and create an archive of everydayness where you’re beautiful enough without having to be a king or queen.
Yeah, I really feel that. As a young Black woman with social media I see a lot about Black excellence and Black girl magic and I see how it can be used as a way to rewrite how we perceive ourselves, but it can also be hard to live up to. It's clear how this exhibition pushes back against that and highlights that you don’t need to be this crazy amazing ‘king’ or ‘queen’ to be important and feel that your life is valued in this country.
That is exactly it. To just celebrate the everyday contribution of the Black community. Even aesthetically speaking, I was really keen to have images that were a little bit strange, and I wonder sometimes what the Black community makes of them. These photographs weren’t just about creating shallow depth of field portraits of people looking amazing; I guess I wanted it to be more poetic than that. I wanted to deal with failure. There’s a style in Black American photography tradition, which they call ‘the edge of failure’. People like Roy DeCarava would shoot at night in the Jazz clubs and their images would be full of camera shakes and mistakes and I love that. I really wanted that feel to translate in these images, these imperfect images. Every so often there’s a photo which I think is a great portrait but for the most part I’m looking for mistakes. When you look at my contact sheets, you can see that I often choose the one just next to the ‘best’ version. To me, the one that’s somewhat offbeat mirrors what I feel is the Black experience in Britain. This slightly off-kilter experience that isn't too neat or too clean.
"To me, the one that’s somewhat offbeat mirrors what I feel is the Black experience in Britain. This slightly off-kilter experience that isn't too neat or too clean."
This off-kilter, unconventional experience – especially of home and belonging – is a theme often explored in James Baldwin’s work. Was it when you were going through your personal archives that you thought of Baldwin? What was the process that led you to title the book and exhibition after the Baldwin quote[1]?
Well, when I was writing my book Afropean, I went to James Baldwin’s house in the South of France, which is a bit of a ruin. To add to this, my mentor – Caryl Phillips – wrote a similar book to Afropean in the 80s and was friends with James Baldwin. Caryl was telling me about the discussions that they’d have in France and the people that would come and sit round the table together and talk about Black life. Baldwin’s one of a number of people who just gets it. Who created certain technologies or tricks to find a way to make life better during the struggle. This idea of having a welcome table that might try and encourage people to gather and discuss became a conceptual framework for us to work under. Even if it doesn’t work, we just wanted to put the idea out there and see how it landed. Somebody might come along and do it better and that’s great because we just wanted to celebrate some of these ideas and bring them to the community to explore. Of course, you’re tryna do the best you can but what’s really interesting was that when me and Roger were looking at The Street Flypaper of Life – a collaboration between Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, which partly inspired our work – we were like, this is great but there’s room for improvement and that’s actually quite nice. It’s almost like a generosity, and with this project there’ll definitely be room for improvement and someone else will come and do it. Our work is like a stepping-stone. We did what we could with the resources that we had and somebody will hopefully take these ideas and hone them. But I like the idea of not making things too definitive – not that we could’ve even if we wanted to. I think it’s good to leave space for interpretation and improvement.
[1] The show’s title comes from a quote by American writer James Baldwin – ‘perhaps home is not a place, but simply an irrevocable condition’.
I actually saw a video where you talk about “happy failure” and how you view Afropean and Home Is Not a Place as “happy failure.” Do you think that’s something that’s gonna carry on throughout your work?
I think it is. For me, happy failure is where a lot of interesting Black ideas come from. It’s encoded in Jazz. It’s encoded in Blues. It’s encoded in Hip Hop. That kind of failure is implicit in those art forms but actually within those cracks the light gets through. In those cracks is what makes it beautiful. It’s what captures and records an experience. That’s why I worry about the king and queen aesthetic in the Black community; it doesn’t leave any space for just… space. I feel it’s too perfect looking, you know. It’s not that there aren’t things we should all aspire to achieve, but I still think there’s space for a different way of recording the Black experience that feels like it really is from the experience rather than purely aspirational.
In the same video, you also speak about working with Roger Robinson and how you deeply enjoyed this collaboration. With home as the theme, I wonder did you feel a sense of home in collaborating with another Black creative?
Yeah, in a way. You know we had this little cocoon in our Mini Cooper. We travelled round the coast in this car and it was funny how it would veer from discussions about Derrida’s ideas of the archive to the latest updates in the Tupac murder investigation. It’d just go back and forth from high to low and that for me felt like home. First time we met, we hit it off. I actually met Roger in prison. We weren’t convicts, we were actually on this Black British writers’ tour and they asked if any of us wanted to give a poetry workshop in Folsom maximum security prison, and we were the only two that say yeah we’ll do it. So we went in and did this workshop and we were both profoundly affected by teaching these young, mostly Black, men. We could see ourselves in these men more than we were expecting and that really created a bond between us; I think we’ve always been interested in this world [art, culture, philosophy] but also what’s going on at the street level.
Johny Pitts is a self taught photographer, writer and broadcaster from Sheffield, England. He is the founder of online journal Afropean.com and author of Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, which awarded him the Jhalak Prize, the Bread & Roses Award, the European Essay Prize, and the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding. Home Is Not A Place was developed through the Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship, a research and development opportunity for mid-career artists. Pitts has been documenting the Black experience in Europe for over ten years.
Roger Robinson is a British writer and educator who has taught and performed worldwide and is an experienced workshop leader and lecturer on poetry. He was chosen by Decibel as one of 50 writers who have influenced the Black-British writing canon. Robinson is the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2019 and The RSL Ondaatje Prize 2020. He received commissions from The National Trust, London Open House, BBC, The National Portrait Gallery, V&A, INIVA, MK Gallery and Theatre Royal Stratford East where he was also an associate artist. He is an alumni of The Complete Works.
Order a copy of Home Is Not A Place here.