Home Is Not A Place

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Beautiful, haunting, thought-provoking ... A book I will return to again and again' Bernardine Evaristo

Science fictionOn 25 November Photoworks activated its 2022 Festival in a Box, an open-access exhibition inspired by Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower. First published in 1993, Butler’s novel charts an America falling into chaos 30 years into the future, and the dogged determination of the narrator as she searches for a new place to call home; with themes of community, tolerance, and the environment, and created as a piece of speculative fiction, it’s the perfect starting point to consider our own fractured present, and imagine a more sustainable future. This issue of Photography+ is inspired by the Festival in a Box. 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. 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. I 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. 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.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.

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. Harlem Church, New York, 1964 Photograph: Andreas Pauly/Estate of Evelyn Hofer, courtesy Galerie m, Bochum, GermanyBeautiful, 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.’ Beautiful, haunting, thought-provoking … A book I will return to again and again’– Bernardine Evaristo 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.

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. 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. Originally commissioned through the Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship, with support from Ampersand Foundation and Photoworks. 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.These landscapes are so ephemeral... so it feels important for me to document these spaces while they’re still here” – Johny Pitts 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’.