PHOTO STORIES
Peter Dench talks to curator Johny Pitts about anew exhibition attempting to piece together complex and counterintuitive expressions of working-class life today
‘At the beginning of last year Brian Cass [senior curator, Hayward Gallery Touring] approached me and said we want to work with you. He’s a very thoughtful and enigmatic man. I said in what kind of capacity? He said would you ever think about curating and I said yeah, so they gave me complete carte blanche. I said what do you have in mind? They said we just want to know what your ideas are,’ explains selftaught photographer, writer and broadcaster Johny Pitts.
In 2021 Pitts collaborated with poet Roger Robinson on the exhibition and book Home is Not a Place (William Collins, Sept 2022). The product of an African-American musician father and a white working-class mother, Pitts began to question what is black Britain today. Together they travelled around the British coast in search of an answer. Pitts’s black experience around Britain became the jump-off point for After the End of History, British Working Class Photography 1989-2024, an exhibition which moves between Coventry, Southend and Nottingham throughout 2024.
‘Within the photography world I noticed that so many of the ‘black photographers’ and people who control the industry were actually from very different places to the one I grew up in,’ he says.
‘I started to get more interested, or at least as interested, in notions of class. As soon as I wanted to incorporate class into the curation, that’s when everything started to take form for me.’
The title references Francis Fukuyama’s influential 1989 essay, The End of History? in which he announced that the great ideological battles between east and west were over, and that western liberal democracy had triumphed. Pitts left behind the British documentary photographers he admired in the era they helped define – Martin Parr, Paul Graham, Chris Killip – and began his selection process post-1989 and looked at what happened after he came of age. admired in the era they helped define – Martin Parr, Paul Graham, Chris Killip – and began his selection process post-1989 and looked at what happened after he came of age.
‘What became of working-class culture when it became harder to pi
