Home Is Not A Place

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Born in Sheffield, North England in the 1980s, Pitts has first-hand experience of a richly multicultural Britain. He grew up in Firth Park, an area that was home to well-established communities from Yemen, Jamaica, Pakistan, and India, as well as white working class people. Later it also became home to economic migrants and refugees from Syria, Albania, Kosovo, and Somalia. Firth Park was no utopia in the conventional sense but it was alive and convivial, built on the tolerant atmosphere that comes of sharing space with diverse cultures. ‘Firth Park was anything but boring,’ Pitts writes in his award-winning book Afropean. ‘It was rough, but it was full of culture and community spirit.’ Originally commissioned through the Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship, supported by The Ampersand Foundation and Photoworks. In the exhibition and accompanying book Robinson's poetry sits alongside Pitts' images from around the country. The show's title comes from a quote by American writer James Baldwin ‘perhaps home is not a place, but simply an irrevocable condition’. Outside of the big cities you get this other Britain that has its own colour and its own challenges... I suppose I wanted to capture some of the hinterlands of Britain” – Johny Pitts A self-taught photographer, working in the tradition of British documentary photography, Pitts was supported by the inaugural Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship working closely with the Photoworks team for twelve months to allow him to develop this new series.

Johny Pitts’s ‘Home Is Not a Place’, c ommissioned by Photoworks for the inaugural Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship, is on view at Graves Gallery, Sheffield, until 24 December and at Stills Gallery, Edinburgh 9 March–10 June 2023. The accompanying book Home is Not a Place by Johny Pitts and Roger Robinson is published by Harper Collins. Originally commissioned through the Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship, with support from Ampersand Foundation and Photoworks. Beautiful, haunting, thought-provoking … A book I will return to again and again’– Bernardine Evaristo These landscapes are so ephemeral... so it feels important for me to document these spaces while they’re still here” – Johny PittsI began thinking of the many ways in which other travellers had made sense of the country through specific trips. In his 1980s masterpiece A1: The Great North Road, photographer Paul Graham explored the north/south divide by travelling up Britain’s central artery. On the eve of the second world war, George Orwell charted a path through industrial cities to carve out a portrait of working-class lives in The Road to Wigan Pier, guided by his network in the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. Johny Pitts is a photographer and writer born in Sheffield. He is the winner of the 2020 Jhalak Prize and the 2021 European Essay Prize. He lives and works in London. Ongoing Covid restrictions, reduced air and freight capacity, high volumes and winter weather conditions are all impacting transportation and local delivery across the globe. Konica occurs a lot in my work, I use it as this haunting logo and motif. I have memories of briefly living in Japan as a child with my parents, and they would always use Konica film. I remember this commercial, ‘Konica colours are calling me’ – this really vibrant 20th-century optimism that never quite worked out. I see Konika as indicative of this failed optimism; this globalisation that became transfigured into something different. But Konica, through its colour wheel logo, seemed a story of togetherness and promised the 21st century was going to be multicultural bliss.

Photographs can create a sense of belonging: alongside his search for a collective image that might reflect his experiences, he has also included personal family albums from a formative period in the late 80s when he lived in Japan. Spliced and reshuffled with more recent photographs taken on return visits, Pitts examines the impulse to archive, and photography’s relationship to memory.

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Harlem Church, New York, 1964 Photograph: Andreas Pauly/Estate of Evelyn Hofer, courtesy Galerie m, Bochum, Germany Roger Robinson is a poet and writer. He is the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2019, The RSL Ondaatje Prize 2020 and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. If you look closely you can see it says ‘Kent’s premier imaging centre’. But what I love about that image is that most people see it and think this is an image taken somewhere in Africa, because you can still find these Konica photo labs all over India and places in Africa. I love the fact that this is Britain now, but it could also be Lagos. It just shows how complicated this country is. And I think that’s why sort of really resonated with me.

Outside of the big cities you get this other Britain that has its own colour and its own challenges. That was one thing that was scary actually, for me, was just seeing how so much of this country is just like a carcass. After ten years of austerity and the Coronavirus, it's just like dead high streets… betting shops, Poundland. Once you get out of London, it’s amazing how many places are like that. I suppose I wanted to capture some of the hinterlands of Britain – the small towns and the high streets. Home is Not a Place will take the form of a touring exhibition, starting in Pitts’ hometown of Sheffield and also a new book, published by Harper Collins in September 2022 which will combine photographs with poems by the T.S. Eliot Prize awardee Roger Robinson. Beautiful, haunting, thought-provoking … A book I will return to again and again' Bernardine Evaristo My friend Ayo bought a place in Margate a few years ago and told me that in 15 years it would be like Brighton. In many ways he was right. Whenever I visit I see changes, with radio stations, independent record stores and boutiques popping up. There is also a growing multicultural creative scene, and when I met Bianca, a banjo player, on the promenade, I knew I wanted to take her photograph. I love trying to subvert national cliches, and Bianca, with her scarf and 50s sunglasses called to mind an imagined British heyday of singers such as Vera Lynn.’ About halfway through the book Home Is Not A Place(2022) there’s a photograph taken from inside a car, looking out through a rainy windscreen at a stretch of water and cliffs, a battered British road map on the dashboard. It’s a useful image to sum up the book, a collaboration between photographer Johny Pitts and poet Roger Robinson that takes the form of a road trip down the Thames and around the British coast. This image is also interesting because it’s so familiar, a view that pretty much anyone in Britain will have seen, but whose interpretation can vary widely from community to community.Finally we present our chosen Community Submission. For this issue, readers were asked to send images based around the idea of The Unhomely, the conception of an estranged experience of home proposed by Sigmund Freud and later developed by postcolonial writer Homi Bhabha. We’re proud to be able to show the image Money Blindness by Accra-based creative Ikon Shepherd. We hope you enjoy this issue. Hotjar sets this cookie to identify a new user’s first session. It stores a true/false value, indicating whether it was the first time Hotjar saw this user.