For 20 years, British photographer Johny Pitts has been travelling around Europe with a camera and a question: what does it actually mean to be Black and European? His answer fills a room at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. “Black Bricolage” brings together photographs, notebooks and documents from cities across the continent – Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Marseille and Brussels – capturing the ordinary lives that rarely make the front page.
Eve Jackson meets the man who made the word “Afropean” his life’s work – a term born in the world of music that he turned into a 20-year photographic journey across the continent – to talk identity, colonial ghosts, the racist backlash facing a Paris mayor and a Harry Potter actor, and why he believes Europe has a picture of itself it hasn’t yet dared to look at.
