Johny Pitts

Afropean: A Journal - Johny Pitts
 

Afropean: A Journal gives an alternative map of the continent, taking the reader to places like Cova Da Moura, the Cape Verdean shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon with its own underground economy, and Rinkeby, the area of Stockholm that is eighty percent Muslim. Pitts visits the former Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, where West African students are still making the most of Cold War ties with the USSR, and Clichy Sous Bois in Paris, which gave birth to the 2005 riots, all the while presenting Afropeans as lead actors in their own story.

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. 

Spanning a 5 month itinerary around Europe on trains searching for a different side of the continent and answers about his own mixed-race identity, Pitts blends photography with personal ephemera - such as tickets, diary notes, maps, postcards and many more collected over his journey - and featuring a selection of brand new essays written by the artist. 

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.

This book has a soundtrack: afropean.com/soundtrack. 

Afropean: A Journal 
Johny Pitts
2024
Edition of 1500
300 pages
241 x 184 mm, portrait
ISBN 978-1-917282-09-3

Press
Dazed

Watch Johny in conversation with The Eyes at Paris Photo here.