Archiving the Afropean Experience with Johny Pitts

In his latest exhibition Black Bricolage, which is currently on view at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, Johny Pitts bears witness to Black experiences in Europe and beyond. Spanning work made between 2004 and 2024, he brings together photographs, archival documents, and notebooks collected in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, London, and several other major cities around the world, gesturing toward a more expansive, ideal possibility of plurality—the freedom to be, first and foremost, human.

Photographer Johny Pitts in conversation with Selma Nouri

In the introduction to Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, author and photographer Johny Pitts writes, “Labels are invariably problematic, often provocative, but at their best they can sing something into visibility.” This line gestures toward the depth and ambition of his project, which—both in text and image—captures a tension familiar across Black and racialised diasporic communities in Europe: the struggle to inhabit, shape, and ultimately inherit a society that continues to structurally and symbolically deny their belonging. Against this backdrop, identity is often framed as a binary demand to resist one culture or overidentify with the other. Yet, as Pitts suggests, it is precisely within, or between, these imposed extremes that a richer, more nuanced sense of self emerges, “a beauty in black banality.”

In his latest exhibition, Black Bricolage, which is currently on view at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, this often overlooked reality is not only made visible but reimagined as a vital site for human understanding and hope. Through a constellation of intimate, vernacular images, alongside notebooks and archival documents, Pitts bears witness to Black experiences in Europe and beyond. Taken between 2004 and 2024, the works span Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, London, and several other major European cities, alongside newer images from Freetown, Salvador da Bahia, and the US Deep South. Across this geography, he resists both stereotype and nostalgia, bringing into focus what so often goes unnoticed: the quiet beauty of identity as neither singular nor exclusive. Instead, he gestures toward a more expansive, ideal possibility of plurality—the freedom to be, first and foremost, human.

“I can’t deny that, somewhere deep down, I still dream of a Europe that is the place it claims to be—free, fair, egalitarian, civilised, open, democratic, not racist,” he says. This dream feels especially urgent in Paris, where the images are currently on view, and where diasporic communities—although central to the city’s cultural fabric—remain insufficiently acknowledged or too often cast as burdens rather than recognised as vital contributors. Within this context, Pitts’ work reads as a quiet yet resolute assertion of presence, dignity, and continuity amid ongoing conditions of exclusion. “I wanted to find a subtle and poetic way to bear witness to these spaces,” he explains, “and to amplify their faint signals, so that future generations might access alternative histories that are always in danger of being lost…because it’s only through such histories that we can begin to imagine alternative futures.” While there is, of course, still much work to be done, his images offer not only testimony but also beauty—and, with it, the possibility of a more hopeful and humane future.

1. Your work exploring Afro-European and Afro-diasporic realities is grounded in over a decade of research and writing. Why is photography so important when documenting or archiving black stories and experiences?

By the time I’d turned 25, I realised that all the unofficial Black cultural spaces that had sustained me—the youth club in a block of flats, the illegal street rave, the pirate radio station that played Black music when the mainstream was ignoring us—had all been demolished or destroyed, with (sometimes necessarily) scant evidence that they had ever existed. I wanted to find a subtle and poetic way to bear witness to these spaces and to boost their weak signals so that generations to come can tap into alternative histories that are always in danger of being lost…because it’s only through such alternative histories that we can begin to imagine alternative futures.

2. In the Black Bricolage press kit, you say that your approach resists “nostalgia.” What do you mean by that?

When you’re dealing with layers of history, with contemporary spaces haunted by or somehow in conversation with the past, you want to be able to honour those stories without being sentimental. When I take photographs of, say, high-rise estates where now-defunct pirate radio stations once broadcast from, I don’t want people to think I’m saying “everything was better back then.” Perhaps some things were, and some things weren’t, but such ideas are often used by the right wing to make people nostalgic for a past that never really existed. This is where slogans such as “Make America Great Again” and “Take Back Our Country” come from.

With that being said, I like Svetlana Boym’s work on nostalgia, where she suggests the term can be split into two, not always binary, types: restorative and reflective. The former is what nationalism thrives on—the attempt to rebuild an imagined past that never really existed. The latter, and perhaps healthier, version of nostalgia “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity,” she says. “Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt… [it] loves details, not symbols.”

3. You’ve described your relationship with Europe as a kind of “lover’s quarrel.” Could you elaborate on what you mean by that and how it manifests in the photographs featured in the exhibition?

I paraphrased the American poet Robert Frost when I wrote that. He said, “My quarrel with the world is a lover’s quarrel.” Having grown up in Europe, taught its history and languages, and bought into its propaganda at a young age, my work is not purely decolonial, even though that is a big part of what motivates me. I can’t deny that, somewhere deep down, I still dream of a Europe that is the place it claims to be—free, fair, egalitarian, civilised, open, democratic, not racist. I came of age in Tony Blair’s Britain, thinking of myself not merely as a Black Briton but as a Black European. My imagination is full of old Renault Clio adverts, watching Frank Rijkaard and Ruud Gullit on a programme called Football Italia, and listening to Black Eurodance music from the Dutch group 2Unlimited, and so on. I love that idea of Europe, but I often feel that this place I love frequently lies to and cheats on me—hence describing my relationship with the continent as a “lover’s quarrel.”

4. Tell us the story of your photograph Tunmise (2021) and how it ended up as the album cover for Blood Orange’s Essex Honey.

Dev got in touch with me on Instagram and said he wanted to use one of my photographs for his new album. When I heard the Masters of Essex Honey, which is so beautiful and wistful, I immediately thought that he was going to ask for the one image that was most problematic: the one I took of a student walking home from school for my project Home is not a Place back in 2021. It was a snapshot taken out of thin air, so I didn’t get his details at the time, and I only noticed the floating tie later on, but I loved the poetry of that moment.

When it came to using the image as an album cover, I knew I had to track the student down. Eventually, from the colour of his tie, I found his school, and as luck would have it, there was a photograph of him on the cover of the school prospectus. So, even though he’d already left, they were able to contact his family and pass on my details. In the end, Tunmise’s family got in touch. We were able to pay him properly, and he even gets VIP tickets to Blood Orange gigs, so it all worked out well.

5. Through your research and travels, what have you observed about Afropean identity in France?

Coming from a slight distance, what I notice about France, especially in its big cities, is how French the Black community often looks, and how Black, France in general appears—even down to the white people whose hair frizzes in the rain just like mine does. Photographically, there is this beautiful blur of Africa and Europe everywhere you look.

6. In speaking about your photographs taken in the US, you’ve said, “it’s one of the few places where, if you don’t engage with the cliches, you’re not really telling the truth.” Could you expand on that?

I can’t remember saying that! But I think there is some truth to it. US cultural hegemony has been so powerful, especially since World War II, that the first thing many people notice when they visit—and they often say this—is, “It’s just like in the movies.” The US has been so extensively documented that it feels possible to know it from a distance in a way that isn’t true of many other countries.

There’s also something about the US as a country full of simulacra. Umberto Eco noticed this in his book Travels in Hyperreality. When you visit a kitsch Las Vegas casino that mimics an ancient Roman amphitheatre, you reach a point where you have to accept that it has its own valid culture and history, one tethered to the empire of the late 20th and early 21st century. The casino is both fake and real at the same time.

I think that’s what I meant by engaging with clichés—everything you think you know about the US is sort of true and not true at the same time. That can’t really be said for somewhere like Paris, which famously has a syndrome named after it, where people are shocked when they’re confronted with the “real Paris” that doesn’t quite match the one they’ve seen in movies or read about.

7. Could you expand on the significance of trains within this exhibition? How does this motif inform your work, and in what ways does it reflect the role of imagery in shaping or navigating questions of identity?

Interesting after the question about America. I was thinking of the work of photographers like Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, or William Eggleston—the motif that runs through so many famous American photobooks is often the car, which is the dominant way of getting around the US. In Europe, it’s the train, and during a period of rising nationalism, especially around Brexit, I wanted to honour that beautiful tradition of interrail.

But in more metaphorical terms, I was also preoccupied with the everyday Black experience. We are so often confronted with hypersexualised or violent images of the Black community, and I wanted to show something else: people on their way to work, taking their kids to school, hanging out with friends, lost in thought, or reading. I often found those moments on metros or trains. It became a way of thinking not only about the everyday, but about that liminal space between A and B.

8. You’ve described your images as having a mellow, almost melancholic atmosphere. Do you feel that quality comes from your own perspective, or does it emerge from the environments and subjects you engage with?

It’s a mixture of both. Photographs are windows and mirrors. I am me, with my own sensibilities and moods, and so I look for points of connection and recognition with others. What emerges is a blend of the two, a record of the features of a relationship.

9. Why the title Black Bricolage? What does that phrase mean to you in the context of this exhibition?

It was a way of honouring the alternative modes of cultural production that Black and working-class practitioners so often grapple with. UK grime made on cracked FruityLoops software and PlayStation 1s, 90s hip-hop built from second-hand Japanese samplers and turntables, graffiti produced illegally with stolen spray cans, and so on.

I’m not trying to suggest this is every Black creative’s journey—more and more, even within the Black community, the artists who “make it” tend to have gone to private school or at least come from middle-class backgrounds. But my Black experience does chime with many others who came up in unloved estates and hinterlands and somehow managed to make work from where they stood, with what they had, and claim it as valid.

10. How has Afropean culture and/or representation shifted over the years based on your own research and thoughts?

I think that, despite the rise in right-wing populism, Black presence and consciousness in Europe is much stronger than when I first started out. I needed Afropean as a way to connect with other Black Europeans who weren’t visible in the mainstream. I would have cousins from Brooklyn come over and say, “Wow, y’all have Black people in Holland?” or whatever, but I think now the fact that there are Black people in Europe is sort of taken for granted.

This was always the point of my work—Afropean as a journey rather than a destination, arriving at a place where maybe the term itself doesn’t even need to be used anymore because we’re all accepted, simply, as human beings. There’s still a lot of work to do before that happens, of course.

11. What do you hope to achieve through this exhibition? What kinds of reflections or responses do you hope it will provoke in viewers?

My work is totally about atmosphere. That’s why I never quite know whether an exhibition is working until we’ve lit the show. It’s not just about work on walls. It’s about feeling, mood, texture, and ambience. It’s a subtle craft, but I hope people want to linger when they enter the space, and even if they don’t remember any specific images, I hope they emerge with a feeling that lingers longer.

Black Bricolage is currently on view at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie until May 24th, 2025.