Johny Pitts’ Poetic Photos Captures the Realities of Being Afropean

Blending photography, social reportage, postcolonial theory and autofiction, Johny Pitts’s new exhibition at MEP in Paris explores “what it means to be Black and European”

In 2010, Sheffield-born Johny Pitts travelled around Europe to search for the meaning of ‘Afropean’. “When I first heard Afropean, it encouraged me to think of myself as whole and unhyphenated,” he explains at the beginning of his critically-acclaimed book Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, published in 2019. Coined in the 1990s, the term was first used in the realms of music and fashion before Pitts reframed it as a utopian alternative – a more positive label for Europe’s Black communities. Beneath the semantics is a desire for inclusion and belonging, with the question at the heart of the project being: Is there a collective, Black, European identity? 

Since its publication, Afropean has expanded and evolved into photo books, podcasts, album covers – including a recent collaboration with Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes – exhibitions, and other writings. The latest iteration is Black Bricolage at Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, an exhibition that fittingly returns Pitts’ empathetic and discerning eye to France. Though he travelled across Europe – from Scandinavia to Russia – a large section of the book focuses on France, a melting pot of ethnicities.

“A sense of racial separation is very pronounced in France,” Pitts says. “The view of France as a secular Republic and the notion that everybody should feel French isn’t really the reality. You can see that, judging by who lives in the centre of cities and who is forced out to the edges.” One of the most striking images in the MEP exhibition, Portable Paradise – taking its name from Roger Robinson’s TS Eliot Poetry Prize-winning poem (which uses the shots as the publication’s cover) – was taken in Clichy-sous-Bois, a commune found in the eastern suburbs of Paris. Referred to disparagingly by many Parisiens as a ‘banlieue’, the area is known for high unemployment and poverty. In his chapter ‘Four Days in Clichy-Sous-Bois’, Pitts describes his sense of alienation upon visiting the neighbourhood, which, in his own words, “resembled a battleground”.

“A Portable Paradise was taken at a ceremony to mark the five-year anniversary of the killing of two Clichy teenagers – Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré – who had been chased to their deaths by police in 2005,” Pitts explains. The incident sparked public outrage and three-week-long riots in Parisian banlieues and other French cities, with President Jacques Chirac announcing a state of emergency and “zero tolerance” towards the rioters (who he controversially called ‘scum’). “The ceremony was supposed to be a moment of remembrance, but it felt like a press opportunity for the white politicians speaking to white journalists,” Pitts says. “The young men in the crowds – who would have been the same age as the two young boys – were completely ignored.” Pitts turned his camera towards the overlooked bystanders. “For me, photography is about making the invisible visible.” This ethos underpins both Afropeans and Black Bricolage with remarkable clarity. “Much of my work focuses on the overlooked peripheries or outskirts of cities, where many marginalised Black communities live.” 

Blending photography, social reportage, postcolonial theory and even at times, autofiction, the early beginnings of Afropean started without a clear plan. Travelling across Europe between the winter of 2010 and the spring of 2011, Pitts had the vague idea to create a book, but had no publisher involved at the time. Retrospectively, he admits this gave him unbridled freedom to document the urban centres and hinterlands of Europe without limitations. But the project was ultimately rooted in his subjective experience. “The journey begins in the personal and arrives at the universal,” he tells me. “I used myself as a conduit to explore what it means to be Black and European.” As a result, the photographs from that period convey a sense of melancholia, a feeling Pitts admits he harboured at the time. “I believe photographs are both windows and mirrors – they can reveal the external world, but also the interior of a photographer.”

Raised in a working-class neighbourhood of Sheffield to a white, English mother and a Brooklyn-born, African-American father, Pitts’ deep empathy with his subjects stems from his own multicultural heritage. Before the age of ten, he also lived in Japan with his family, a formative exposure to internationalism that has undoubtedly shaped his creative outlook. Pitts’ key mission is to contest representational stereotypes of different peoples and cultures, especially people of colour in the UK and abroad, where Black individuals are often reductively labelled as ‘immigrants’, cast as villains or victims, or exoticised subjects in fashion shoots. “I want to capture the quotidian, the everyday … to show the natural and normal presence of Blackness within European culture,” he explains. Moreover, he is validating that Blackness is an ordinary and inextricable part of European identity and history. As historian David Olusoga asserts in his book Black and British: A Forgotten History, the presence of Black people in Britain (let alone Europe) goes back to antiquity, well before the Windrush era. 

While Pitts initially intended for the project to “be a celebration of Blackness in Europe”, or resemble a kind of coffee-table publication, it turned into something more layered, deeply felt and politically charged. “It turned out to be something more challenging,” he says. “I realised I had been too confident in my initial understanding of what it meant to be Afropean. But I couldn’t ignore the brutal realities of what I witnessed.” 

The resulting “messiness” of his final work prompted Pitts to adopt the label ‘bricolage’ for the MEP exhibition title. It encapsulates the complexity and fragmentary nature of his research, which, like a jigsaw, had been brought to fruition by many parts. Translating into ‘do-it-yourself’ in French, bricolage also reflects his self-funded, deep dive into European Black communities. But further afield, bricolage also resonates with intellectual theories, notably Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of the ‘bricoleur’: an individual who improvises and constructs myths from pre-existing cultural fragments. 

One of the most striking shots included in Black Bricolage captures a young British school boy named Tunmise, his school uniform tie flying in the wind as he looks to the ground pensively, holding a basketball and mobile phone. It is an ordinary image, yet quietly poetic. Originally part of his photo book Home Is Not A Place, the shot is now the cover of Blood Orange’s album Essex Honey. “I saw something of myself in this student walking home from school,” Pitts reflects. Six years later, Dev Hynes approached Pitts, asking for an image for the album cover. “I immediately knew it had to be that one.” Unfortunately, Pitts had no contact for the young boy. The only information he had was the boy’s local area. “I started searching around, determined to track him down.” Finally, from searching through local schools’ prospectuses, Pitts serendipitously spotted Tunmise. He made contact and got Tunimise’s permission to use the image – a moment that has no doubt changed the young man’s life. “He now gets VIP access to Blood Orange gigs,” Pitts adds. 

Black Bricolage moves beyond a simple celebration of diversity, becoming a poetic yet unflinching reclamation of Black presence across Europe. “Afropean emerged from having a creative impulse and the urge to say something,” Pitts concludes. “I’m trying to make images with my pen, and tell stories with my camera.” In doing so, his work offers a clear answer to the question at its core: a collective Black European identity does exist – not as a fixed or unified whole, but as something plural, contested and continually in the making, a fraught bricolage. Shaped by history, inequality and everyday life, it is this very complexity that defines Europe itself.

Black Bricolage by Johny Pitts is on show at Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris until 24 May 2026.