Home Is Not A Place

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We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. Beautiful, haunting, thought-provoking … A book I will return to again and again' Bernardine Evaristo 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. 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. 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.

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. 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’. Harlem Church, New York, 1964 Photograph: Andreas Pauly/Estate of Evelyn Hofer, courtesy Galerie m, Bochum, Germany 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. While love and leisure are common themes in the American pictures, when Hofer does turn to labour, it feels exuberant and fresh: in Secretaries in Rawlings Park, Washington DC and Chauffeurs, Washington (both 1965) she pays homage to the inexorable power of immaculate style. In contrast to her abject view of an old-fashioned Europe, the US appears modern, consumer-friendly and free.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. Ongoing Covid restrictions, reduced air and freight capacity, high volumes and winter weather conditions are all impacting transportation and local delivery across the globe. Hotjar sets this cookie to identify a new user’s first session. It stores a true/false value, indicating whether it was the first time Hotjar saw this user. Outside of the big cities you get this other Britain that has its own colour and its own challenges... I suppose I wanted to capture some of the hinterlands of Britain” – Johny Pitts Beautiful, haunting, thought-provoking … A book I will return to again and again’– Bernardine Evaristo

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. I waited for the longest time and then I saw this couple. The guy was waiting outside and I saw her coming out. When I took the image, I was like, ‘Oh my god, that is the image.’ I went up to them and said, ‘I just took your photograph. Do you mind? Can I use it?’ So we shared details and I sent them a copy of it and they were happy. 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.Beautiful, 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.’