In ‘Black Bricolage’, Johny Pitts assembles two decades of photographs, writing and lived encounters into a portrait of Black European life that resists spectacle, fixed identities and easy definitions.
25 AUGUST 2026
What does it mean to photograph Black life without making Blackness exceptional? For British artist, writer and photographer Johny Pitts, the answer lies in the everyday. In ‘Black Bricolage’, Pitts draws together twenty years of images, notebooks and encounters, tracing a visual language shaped by working-class ingenuity, DIY culture and the interconnected histories of the African diaspora.
From Sheffield and Stockholm to Lisbon, Freetown and Salvador da Bahia, Pitts looks beyond dominant narratives of migration and identity towards what he calls the “banality of Blackness”, where ordinary lives carry the traces of much larger histories. Speaking with ART AFRICA, Pitts reflects on bricolage as a creative and political method, the evolving idea of the Afropean, photography’s relationship to writing, and why his engagement with Europe remains, in his words, a “lover’s quarrel.”
Brendon Bell-Roberts: The title ‘Black Bricolage’ suggests building something from fragments, memories, and lived experiences. As an artist and as someone thinking through Black life in Europe, what does bricolage mean to you?
Johny Pitts: For me it is a celebration of art and culture made against the odds, and a personal journey that has been all about building some sort of visual language from a place of lack (lack of a network, amenities, opportunities, etc), especially in such a racist and snobby world as the art industry. I realised that all of the psychic resources I could draw upon both locally in my own multicultural working-class community, and across the African Diaspora, had this element of DIY culture. Locally that meant pirate radio stations broadcast from high rise brutalist estates covered in graffiti (Sheffield at the time had one of the best graffiti scenes in Europe), and music made out of bits of any random pieces of second-hand Japanese tech that we could get our hands on. I used to write poetry on the back of till receipts when I worked in a warehouse, and my first camera was from a pawn shop; my first photographs were taken on the cheapest possible consumer-grade film. This is not Eggleston’s or Cartier-Bresson’s world, and Black Bricolage is my attempt to value this other black, working-class journey to photography and insist that a certain genius is born out of the black struggle. That a rose blooming through concrete, even if dustier, is often more interesting than a rose blooming in a well-tended garden.
This exhibition brings together work made over twenty years. Looking back, what has changed in how Black European life is seen and represented, and what has remained the same?
I think people are more used to seeing, say, a Black Dutch person, or a Swede who maybe has Eritrean heritage, for example. When I first started out, such complexities were rarely exported as part of Europe’s national identities, even to the extent that sometimes members of the black community were shocked to go to Portugal or Germany and see other black people – which is crazy when you think of those countries’ histories. People take it for granted a little more now, which I think is a good thing. Part of it, of course, is due to the rise of the internet during those years. It’s weird when I look at photographs up until around 2010; nobody is on their phones. Now it is quite hard to take photographs out on the street and see people without their phones. And I think that hints at how we are all more interconnected, and for all the awful things about the internet, it has allowed disenfranchised groups to cut out middlemen and connect outside of what has come to be known as ‘the mainstream media’.
Much of your work focuses on everyday moments rather than dramatic events. What draws you to the ordinary, and what can it tell us about Black life that other forms of representation often miss?
Going back to my answer about Black DIY culture, and trying to find a visual language that might stand up next to that of wealthy white photographers. I remember there was a show about Henri Cartier Bresson on in Paris a while back called ‘l’œil du siècle’ – “the eye of the century”. I’m picking on Cartier Bresson (whom I actually deeply admire) a lot here, but I remember thinking that title was a really grand statement. And I would juxtapose his super well-framed shots embedded with surrealism and perfect geometry through a Leica Lens, and feel that actually his ‘decisive moments’ often got in the way of the truth – that photographs of the same events he was documenting, but found in family albums taken in a vernacular style, had more atmosphere. All that to say that I mistrust work that is hyper-journalistic, or with perfect formal style. For me, it’s the everyday moments of the black community – the independent businesses, the street style, people going about their everyday lives- that tend to sing more with time than photographs of the superlative – models, footballers, protests or whatever the current news cycle is on. I’m always looking at the edges, and thinking about how I might make my photography slightly more down to earth.
You have described discovering the term “Afropean” as a turning point. Since you first began working with it, how has your understanding of that idea evolved?
It has shattered into a thousand pieces. It’s a classic case of ‘the more you learn the less you know’. I was far more sure of myself as a younger photographer in terms of what Blackness and Europeanness were supposed to mean, but the more I have documented it all, the blurrier everything has become. The nice thing about having an archive going back twenty years is that you can mix the overconfident power portraits with stuff that is more opaque, and stranger. And sometimes I go back into the archive and find images that I initially thought were failures and now see them as a success, and vice versa. So as the idea shifts, it’s not just my new work that is changing but also my archive, as I look at it with new eyes. But even in the early days, I think I always thought of Afropean more in terms of it as an imaginative place of possibility, rather than something that could be pinned down easily. It has always been an elusive concept that haunts my work, rather than dominates it.
Your photographs move between European cities and other sites across the African diaspora. How have these journeys changed the way you think about Europe and its relationship to Black identity?
At the risk of contradicting my last answer a little here, what has been strange is that as I’ve been travelling Europe, meeting with the black community and my understanding of the history of the black presence in Europe has deepened – as my own sense of the normality of blackness – or what I call ‘the banality of blackness – in Europe has, actually, grown much stronger, the far-right has grown in popularity to challenge that feeling on so many levels. Black European identity has never been more contested despite the increased visibility and awareness. Perhaps because of the increased visibility and awareness! So on a personal/cultural level, my journeys have been very empowering, but on a political level they have felt quite depressing in terms of the growing issues we’re dealing with. The discourse around Jason Arday is only one such recent example.
Your work often reveals how colonial histories continue to shape the present. How do you approach photographing these connections without reducing people to history alone?
For me, it begins with that banality/quotidian experience. It would be amazing, when I travelled to make this body of work, to see how many ordinary encounters could be traced so firmly in a wider Afro-European history. I’m thinking specifically of an encounter I had in Rinkeby, on the outskirts of Stockholm on a very snowy day. I met a man who seemed to have lost his mind and claimed to be Nelson Mandela’s brother – he was shouting it out in the streets, and everybody was ignoring him. When I actually sat down with him, I learned that while he was talking figuratively about being Nelson Mandela’s brother, he actually was an ANC freedom fighter and was put into political prison in Botswana in the early 80s, and Sweden, under Olaf Palme, had offered him asylum. There was this amazing turn of global events that had landed this old black South African man in snowy Stockholm. The more you speak to people – especially black people – the more you realise the big stories that haunt the seemingly banal. To try to answer the question: the personal is the political; the personal is encoded with the universal – history is all around us in changed form.
Writing plays an important role in ‘Black Bricolage’. What does writing allow you to explore that photography cannot?
I don’t pit the forms against each other like that. It’s all about expression. I’m trying to capture a feeling, and sometimes I get lucky and capture that feeling through the lens, other times I’m able to conjure it with a pen…if I’m really on form I might actually capture the feeling with both my pen and my camera, but when I put them together they never match perfectly – it’s like looking at the same thing from two different angles.
At a time when debates around migration, identity, and belonging are increasingly polarised across Europe, what specific role can artists play in creating more complex, human narratives?
When I was given the EM Forster Award from the American Academy last year, I was reminded of the words of my mentor Caryl Phillips, who said that even though he doesn’t use the word ‘Afropean’ himself, it made him think of Forster’s immortal words: ‘Only Connect’. My quarrel with the continent is like a lover’s quarrel – and I will not walk away from the fight or the love affair.
This exhibition was on view at La Mep Studio, from 4 April until 24 May 2026.
