The Glitching Nostalgia of Johny Pitts

By Pelumi Odubanjo

Nostalgia is a recurring thread that runs through the work of Johny Pitts. It surfaces in his flickering portraits of Black European individuals and communities, and in his poetic musings throughout travels from the edges of Europe to the cities of Japan. In Pitts’ practice, nostalgia is a lens through which he explores diasporic identity and geography. Through this lens, he brings into focus lives often relegated to the margins of modernity and globalisation. Rather than seeking to recenter or rewrite these narratives, Pitts illuminates them, shedding light on overlooked stories, places, and people. In doing so, he presents new ways of looking at the past, as well as the present and the future.

Over the past decade, Pitts’ body of work has revealed a deep fascination with the strangeness the camera can produce - an uncanny space between documentation and imagination. This fascination is closely tied to his explorations of the late twentieth century through to the present day, as he continues to navigate the shifting terrain of globalism and multiculturalism in the aftermath of colonialism. His work engages with the social, cultural, and political upheavals of this era, tracing the emergence of new life forms, expressions, and modes of resistance.

Speaking to Pelumi Odubanjo, artist, curator, and writer Johny Pitts shares the layered meaning behind his previous and upcoming bodies of work, including his ongoing project Sequel to a Dream: Ghosts of 1980s Japan.

Your recent book with MÖREL, Afropean: A Journal continues the work of your previous book, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe. Could you tell me about this continuation?

As I was travelling with the Afropean project, that's all I knew about it - that it was a project, and I would use the tools with which I work - the pen and the camera - to try to say something about multiculturalism in the wake of colonialism, and the Black experience in Europe. Because I couldn't get a publisher back then (I made the initial trip back in 2010, in the global financial crisis), it was a total, using my meagre savings to self-fund the trip via an interrail pass. I came back with over 10,000 images - digital and film - and about 300,000 words worth of notes. I think I had identified a kind of subtle tradition of books that involved a mix of words and images, such as the collaborations between John Berger and Jean Mohr, or Francois Maspero and Anaik Frantz, but knew it would be a difficult task to bring it all together into a single volume. In the end, Penguin published my work as a piece of narrative nonfiction, with a few images splashed throughout, and while I'm very proud of that book - it was what it needed to be - I was a little bit heartbroken that there wasn't really an established market or format to bring out the full scope of my work. When Aron Morel came over to my studio years later, he noticed my diaries and scrapbooks, and all the ephemera from the journey I had laid around, and asked if I'd like to publish it as an art book. It was honestly a dream working with Aron - he totally got what I was trying to do and what the book needed to be in terms of its haptics and mood and pushed me further. I don’t think there are many publishers maverick enough to bring the work together in the way we did. So to me the two books together is the complete experience of this particular body of work - they're each as important to me as the other, and it's very satisfying to see the full expression finally out in the world.

In a previous interview with The British Journal of Photography, you spoke about “the reduction of the Black British experience into a single, neat, London-oriented narrative” concerning ways you view identity, blackness and community. Could you talk about how the term ‘diaspora’ functions across your projects?

What is interesting to me is that the term 'diaspora' is borrowed from the Jewish concept, which in that context always had the notion of a homeland in mind. With the Black Diaspora to which I belong - slightly different from the notion of African diaspora - I think the notion of homeland is more a kind of imagined geography, rather than something literal, which has expressed itself in various ideas such as Paul Gilroy's 'Black Atlantic' or Afrofuturism. Because of transatlantic slavery, there is no solid piece of ground to go back to for many Black people, and so this imagined space is created to dream, to hold in history, build psychic bridges across oceans and cultures, and consider alternative futures. And I would say that everything I do falls under the umbrella of these ideas.


In Afropean: A Journal, so much of your research was activated through your collection of personal ephemera collated over the course of your travels. Could you talk more about the role of collecting in your research and practice? And how does this method of research function in current or future projects?

I have this obsession with this idea of the 'concrete rose' that we so often see expressed in African American music - from Ben E. King to Aretha Franklin and 2Pac. It's the rose that isn't nurtured in a well-tended garden, but still manages to grow anyway, through a crack in the sidewalk. Its petals may be tatty, but the aforementioned artists encourage us to look at its very existence as a thing of beauty, because of the difficult path it took to grow. I sort of feel that way about working class archives; it maybe hasn't been stored in acid-free boxes, or kept at the right temperature, or organised properly with corresponding metadata, yet whatever state it is in, it is to me a miracle that it has survived. I noticed how my Mom had the foresight to keep all of the family negatives in plastic bags as well as the family albums, so I was very much inspired by her, and even before I started taking myself seriously as an artist, I was thinking about posterity. If I don't bear witness to these people and spaces, to these things that prove they and I existed, who will? So when I got the chance to bring the book together with Aron, I didn't want to hide my brush strokes - I wanted to somehow capture the journey in a visceral way that had raised the curtain and revealed the struggle. That's where the notes and ephemera, encoded with the stains of the experience, came in.

What role does the camera and photography play in your practice at large? And does your approach to photographing differ depending on the project, region, history that you are located in?

"What camera do you use?" is the classic question photographers tend to find irritating, because they buy into the whole "the best camera is the one you have with you" idea - they want us to believe it's all about how good their eye is. But actually I think the type of camera used for a particular project is central. I don't mean that I'm a 'kit guy' obsessing over Leica’s or which lens produces the best bokeh, or whatever, but more on a cultural/spiritual level. Nobuyoshi Araki once described how; "if you want to change your photographs, you need to change cameras. A...camera has something that I suppose you might describe as its own distinctive aura" and I think that's true. I also think of Brian Eno's Ugliness Theory a lot - how the imperfect reproduction of a given piece of tech ultimately becomes its signature feel . People tried to avoid grain in the film era, now that's seen as beautiful - the same with Nikon Coolpix cameras or Blackberries from the early 2000s - that nasty early digital look somehow becomes beautiful over time because it represents, in Eno's words; "the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them". So yeah, when I shoot my project about 80s Japan, I use the camera I found in my Dad's flat after he passed, that he bought in Japan in the 80s. When I shot my book with DoBeDo about Lost in Translation, I used a Konica Big Mini, which is what the Japanese photographer Hiromix used, whose snapshots inspired Sofia Coppola to make her film. Sometimes you don't have a choice - my first camera was some random film SLR I found in a Cash Converters-type store near where I grew up, and I couldn't afford anything else. But that becomes important somehow - the journey of the technology, the object-oriented ontology of it all. In my opinion, the objects used to document a thing should somehow be of the thing being documented.


In your current work revisiting Japan, you address the experience of nostalgia through your childhood memories and connection to the country. Could you talk more about this? In particular, you’ve previously described Japan in the 1980s as a place of “glitching nostalgia and failed futures”. Could you expand on this also

I'm fascinated by nostalgia. I think we live in a very nostalgic moment - people of all generations - from Gen Z to Boomers are really mourning the promise of the end of the 20th century I think. I like Svetlana Boym's work on this, where she identifies two forms of nostalgia; restorative and reflective. The former is what right-wing nationalism thrives on; the call to rebuild an imagined past that never really existed (Make America Great Again!). The latter, and perhaps healthier version of nostalgia “…dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt…loves details, not symbols”. Whether it's the Donkey Kong soundtrack going viral on Instagram, or the whole early internet/Vapourware aesthetic, or even the dead mall phenomenon, people are interested in this time just before the internet, when walls - both figurative and literal - appeared to be falling rather than constructed. And my early memories are of a place that was at the absolute zenith of all this; 1980s Japan, land of Namco and uber plazas, and 20th century futures. And I had a great time! But as an adult with critical thinking, I like to time travel back to those memories, look at what allowed them to happen, and play in the bittersweet ambivalence of the question; were things really great, or was I just young and living in a capitalist mirage?

How did it feel to return to Japan after all these years? How were your childhood memories of Japan affected, if at all, by this return?

I went back for the first time as an adult in 2013 and for the first few days I was walking around in a sort of daze. Of course the jet lag didn't help, but more than that it was this feeling that something felt off. In a way everything was the same, which meant that everything was different - because the same hi-tech postmodern buildings that once represented the future, now no longer represented the actual future, which was now the present, if that makes sense? I had walked through these streets as a child in the 1980s, but as an adult these streets were stuck in time; the future as imagined by the 1980s rather than something representative of the future now. Through research I later learned that I'd lived in Japan as a child during an extraordinary period known as the 1986-1991 'Bubble Era' which saw a huge economic boom for Japan. It collapsed in 1991, and the years since have come to be known as 'the lost decades', a period in Japan marked by economic stagnation and lack of cultural and tech innovation. So when I walk around Japan now I'm sort of 'out of time' - I see the ghosts of the 80s, and my own childhood, merged with a 21st century reality. My gaze on Japan comes from an in-between place.

Your touring exhibition After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989 – 2024 is currently on show at Stills, Edinburgh. How would you define the term ‘working class’ today? And has your definition of this term changed over time in relation to your travels and different encounters with communities and individuals?

Yes, travel really saved me, I think. I grew up in a terrace house in a lower-working class area on the outskirts of Sheffield called Firth Park. I had a happy childhood and though it could be rough, it was a special, multicultural community I grew up in. But when I started to get to my mid-teens a lot of kids I grew up with started falling by the wayside - quite serious stuff too - jailed for drugs, murder…But I think because I had this blip in Japan as a child I knew the world was bigger than where I grew up, so didn’t define myself within the parameters of my postcode, and that was so important. I wanted to look at the last 35 years of working class creativity through photography because it's an interesting unit of time. The economist Francis Fukuyama famously penned his essay 'The End of History' in 89, which claimed that Western Liberal Democracy under capitalism was now the zenith of human organisation, and would be the singular system under which we'd live. With Trump and Musk, I think it's safe to say that moment is now over, and we're entering something even worse that neoliberal Capitalism, which is to say a kind of finite capitalism that results in feudalism (I hope I'm wrong, and this is just a blip - but things have been going this way for a long time!). But back in 1989 I think Fukuyama captured the Zeitgeist - it was the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nelson Mandela about to be released from Prison. You also had the opening up of cheap travel for working class people resulting in a more democratic tourism. So while the depictions of working class culture most people think of emerge from the 80s and before - mostly white people as miners, steel workers, kids jumping on mattresses outside council estates - in the 90s you have globalisation, cheap air travel, credit, brand names, House and Jungle music and an increasingly multicultural society, so the whole logic, look and feel of working class culture shifts, becomes more ambiguous and complex, for better or worse. So that's why I set those parameters for the show - I wanted to explore these shifts in all their messiness.

After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989 – 2024 is on display at Stills, Edinburgh until June 28th. His book 'For Relaxing Times...' published by DoBeDo can be found here.