Photographer Johny Pitts and poet Roger Robinson wanted to use their art to reflect on the experiences of Black Britons outside the capital. So they rented a red Mini Cooper and set off clockwise around the UK coast
Good journeys start with loose itineraries. At Roger Robinson’s home in Northampton, by a rain-dappled window one windswept Wednesday, we pored over a large, unfolded Geographers’ A-Z of Great Britain splayed out across his kitchen table. Looking at this map, with its iconic blue/red/white colourway, we were reappropriating that old racist chant sung on British football terraces in the 1970s and 80s; there is Black in the union jack. From Hove to Hull, we had Black friends everywhere.
Roger and I had spoken about a potential collaboration for years. I lent one of my photographs to the cover of Roger’s TS Eliot prize-winning collection of poetry, A Portable Paradise. For my birthday, Roger gave me a copy of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a collaboration between two African Americans, the poet Langston Hughes and photographer Roy DeCarava, detailing everyday life in 1950s Harlem. I often mentioned the 1970s anthology Worlds: Seven Modern Poets, in which a group of photographers follow poets through the landscapes that inspire their writing, and my admiration of John Berger and Jean Mohr’s A Seventh Man, charting the struggles of European migrants, also from the 1970s.
Model Eunice Olumide in the wind, 2021
‘I’d never taken photographs of a model before,’ writes Johny Pitts, ‘and actually am not at all interested in fashion photography, but it was fascinating working with somebody who knows their body and face so well. Her lack of ego was interesting – she wasn’t interested in me getting the most flattering image of her, but rather of us getting the most interesting image, a true collaboration. The weather, as usual, was truly awful. We went out together, near where she grew up, in a thunderstorm, hence her gusty hair.’