Johny Pitts - Afropean: A Journal
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 RECONTRES D'ARLES AUTHOR BOOK AWARD
Afropean: A Journal, takes twenty years of photographs, notebooks, and ephemera documenting the Black experience in Europe between 2004- 2024, through various crises from the wake of 9/11 and the Iran War through the global financial crisis, Brexit, the rise of rightwing populism in the 2010s and Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine in the 2020s. A working Black photographer himself, Johny Pitts self-funded a series of Interrail trips through Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm, Moscow, Kyiv, Zagreb, Rome, Marseille, Lisbon and many more places, illuminating often misunderstood and misrepresented Afro-European communities in words and images.
Johny Pitts presents an ongoing visual documentation to the lives and cultures of Black Europeans bringing together twenty years of photography, notebooks and ephemera. Adding new layers of understanding of the Black experience in Europe, and spanning cities such as Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Brussels, Amsterdam and Stockholm, Pitts delves even deeper into the lives, histories, and cultures of Afropeans.
About the artist
Born in Sheffield, Johny Pitts is a self-taught photographer, writer and broadcaster. The founder of the online journal Afropean.com and author of Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (Penguin, 2020), Pitts spent more than a decade documenting the Black experience in Europe. Afropean: Notes from Black Europe has been translated into eight languages and won the Jhalak Prize, the European Essay Prize, the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding and The Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing. Home is not a Place (Harper Collins, 2022), collaborating with TS Eliot Prize Winning Poet Roger Robinson - which also toured UK galleries such as the Photographers’ Gallery in London, Graves Gallery in Sheffield, and Stills Gallery in Edinburgh - to tell the story of Black Britain through photographs and poems, was shortlisted for a British Book Award and won the Ampersand Photoworks Fellowship. Look Again: Visibility (2022), an essay part of the Tate Publishing’s series of books exploring the National Collection of British Art, examining the notion of ‘visibility’ in Tate’s galleries, was highly commended for accessible art writing at the 2024 Historians of British Art Book Prize. In 2021, Pitts was the guest editor of The Eyes issue 12: The B-Side, focusing on Black photographers in Europe.
As a photographer, he has had solo exhibitions at FOAM, Amsterdam and The Photographer’s Gallery, London, amongst others, the former showcasing photographs from Afropean: Travels in Black Europe, a series of photographs accompanying the book of the same name. In 2024, he curated the touring exhibition, After The End of History: British Working Class Photographers 1989-2024 for The Hayward Gallery, focussing on how photography has enabled working class artists to explore the beauty, challenges and diversity of everyday life. The tour includes Focal Point Gallery, Southend; Bonington Gallery, Nottingham; Stills: Centre for Photography, Edinburgh.
Johny’s broadcasting credentials includes presenting on MTV, BBC and ITV and, he is currently the host of Open Book for BBC Radio 4. He is also the host of the new podcast, Afropean: The Podcast.
He is a European Young Leader, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a National Geographic Explorer and runs the ENAR (European Network Against Racism) award winning afropean.com with Nina Camara, Yomi Bazuaye, Tola Ositelu and Nat Illumine.
To hear from some of Europe's leading Black artists, academics and activists, some of whom appear in this book, as well as immersive soundscapes from a selection of European cities Johny Pitts photographed, listen to the Afropean Podcast here.
Afropean: A Journal
Johny Pitts
2024
Edition of 1500
300 pages
241 x 184 mm, portrait
ISBN 978-1-917282-09-3
Press
British Journal of Photography
Dazed
The Eye of Photography
Photobooks We Love from 2024 - PhMuseum
Top 10 (+1) Photobooks of 2024 - 1000 Words Mag
The 7 Best Photography Books of 2024 - WIRED
Photobooks of 2024: Part II - Photobookstore
Watch Johny Pitts in conversation with The Eyes at Paris Photo here.
Watch Johny Pitts discuss his processes and the importance of Paris within his work: Paris Noir : L’histoire capitale des artistes afro-descendants | Tracks | ARTE
Listen to the playlist:
