Published by Morel Books by British author, broadcaster and photographer Johny Pitts, Afropean: A Journal is a new chapter in his long-term exploration of Black identity in Europe.
Who hasn’t dreamed of an Interrail trip? Since 1972, this rail pass has erased borders and become the ultimate ticket for any student eager to explore Europe on a budget. But what is Europe? What does European identity mean? In 2010, when Johny Pitts embarked on his own journey across the continent with an Interrail pass, these were the questions he set out to answer.
Born in Sheffield to an English mother of Irish descent and an African-American father, he grew up in a neighbourhood he describes as multicultural. As a child, his group of friends was a mix of “working-class white kids, Jamaicans, Somalis, Yemenis…” During the era of New Labour and Tony Blair, they all felt “very European.” In a photograph from the book, where he is perhaps eight or ten years old, he proudly wears a « Europe » t-shirt.
After 9/11 however, he began to notice a crack, which grew into a real rupture seven years later during the subprime mortgage crisis: « I couldn’t put it into exact words then, but I started to notice lots of disjunctions, across the political spectrum, but even within my own group of friends. » For the young man, this sparked a desire to rediscover Europe: « I was trying to reconfigure what it meant to be a black European and living in a multicultural Europe. »
Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm, Moscow, Marseille, Lisbon… Johny Pitts set out to meet those he named Afropeans, borrowing a musical term coined by singer David Byrne and the group Zap Mama. He met them on the outskirts of cities, like Clichy-sous-Bois near Paris or Rinkeby in Stockholm. In the city centres, he sought out national stereotypes to subvert them through people rarely associated with such symbols, a black Buckingham Palace guard for instance. In Rome, it was an ancient statue. In Moscow, he looked at Pushkin, whose African origins are often forgotten.
For Johny Pitts, the goal is not to document “the immigrant experience in Europe” but to highlight the multicultural reality of Europe’s roots: «I’m not exoticizing. I’m trying to look at a natural blackness that is in Europe and has been for a long time. And that’s kind of where Afropean comes in. It’s not saying, oh, here are some black people in Europe. No, these are black people of Europe. »
From these encounters, he produced the first-ever published essay on Afro-European identity, weaving together the words of writers who influenced his thinking with the testimonies of those he met. His work shows how these individuals are reinventing their identities, countering stereotypes that obscure Europe’s relationship with its own origins.
The book he is publishing today with Morel Books is a visual chronicle of his journey. With 300 pages of photographs, text, notes and memories, it is inspired by the scrapbook form and offers an immersive experience through the different cities of his rail roadtrip. Johny Pitts and his publisher Aron Morel conceived the object as a ‘haptic book’, playing with different types of paper, a desire that for the author goes back to a memory from his adolescence, when he had a series of albums produced by the music collective Soulquarians. They used a special paper that allowed you to feel the music on the CD. There is something very musical about the sometimes jerky rhythm of the book.
The full-page photographs of the book immerse us in a similar cadence, balancing the spontaneity of snapshots with the aesthetics of imperfection. Inspired by Stanley Greene — himself influenced by Roy DeCarava — Johny Pitts describes it as “photography at the edge of failure.” Blurred motion, reflections, and plays of light create an ambient poetry that contrasts with more direct images, especially the numerous portraits populating this odyssey — the faces of Afropeanity.
Afropean: A Journal is a hybrid object, halfway between an anthropological study, a personal journal, and a visual experimentation. It immerses us in the world of an author who has dedicated his life to redefining Europe’s contours, highlighting the richness of its heritage and the multiculturalism that is its driving force. For Johny Pitts, “Black Europe is ancient. Black Europe is part of the future too!!!”
Zoé Isle de Beauchaine
Johny Pitts – Afropean: A Journal
Published by Morel Books
Edition: 1500
294 pages
241 x 184 mm, portrait
Available online and in all good bookstores.
