Home Is Not A Place

Product Information

While love and leisure are common themes in the American pictures, when Hofer does turn to labour, it feels exuberant and fresh: in Secretaries in Rawlings Park, Washington DC and Chauffeurs, Washington (both 1965) she pays homage to the inexorable power of immaculate style. In contrast to her abject view of an old-fashioned Europe, the US appears modern, consumer-friendly and free. Roger Robinson is a poet and writer. He is the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2019, The RSL Ondaatje Prize 2020 and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. I began thinking of the many ways in which other travellers had made sense of the country through specific trips. In his 1980s masterpiece A1: The Great North Road, photographer Paul Graham explored the north/south divide by travelling up Britain’s central artery. On the eve of the second world war, George Orwell charted a path through industrial cities to carve out a portrait of working-class lives in The Road to Wigan Pier, guided by his network in the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement.

Outside of the big cities you get this other Britain that has its own colour and its own challenges. That was one thing that was scary actually, for me, was just seeing how so much of this country is just like a carcass. After ten years of austerity and the Coronavirus, it's just like dead high streets… betting shops, Poundland. Once you get out of London, it’s amazing how many places are like that. I suppose I wanted to capture some of the hinterlands of Britain – the small towns and the high streets.

Gift Wrapping

Science fictionOn 25 November Photoworks activated its 2022 Festival in a Box, an open-access exhibition inspired by Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower. First published in 1993, Butler’s novel charts an America falling into chaos 30 years into the future, and the dogged determination of the narrator as she searches for a new place to call home; with themes of community, tolerance, and the environment, and created as a piece of speculative fiction, it’s the perfect starting point to consider our own fractured present, and imagine a more sustainable future. This issue of Photography+ is inspired by the Festival in a Box. My friend Ayo bought a place in Margate a few years ago and told me that in 15 years it would be like Brighton. In many ways he was right. Whenever I visit I see changes, with radio stations, independent record stores and boutiques popping up. There is also a growing multicultural creative scene, and when I met Bianca, a banjo player, on the promenade, I knew I wanted to take her photograph. I love trying to subvert national cliches, and Bianca, with her scarf and 50s sunglasses called to mind an imagined British heyday of singers such as Vera Lynn.’ I waited for the longest time and then I saw this couple. The guy was waiting outside and I saw her coming out. When I took the image, I was like, ‘Oh my god, that is the image.’ I went up to them and said, ‘I just took your photograph. Do you mind? Can I use it?’ So we shared details and I sent them a copy of it and they were happy. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.

Originally commissioned through the Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship, with support from Ampersand Foundation and Photoworks. Johny Pitts is a photographer and writer born in Sheffield. He is the winner of the 2020 Jhalak Prize and the 2021 European Essay Prize. He lives and works in London. If you look closely you can see it says ‘Kent’s premier imaging centre’. But what I love about that image is that most people see it and think this is an image taken somewhere in Africa, because you can still find these Konica photo labs all over India and places in Africa. I love the fact that this is Britain now, but it could also be Lagos. It just shows how complicated this country is. And I think that’s why sort of really resonated with me. Finally we present our chosen Community Submission. For this issue, readers were asked to send images based around the idea of The Unhomely, the conception of an estranged experience of home proposed by Sigmund Freud and later developed by postcolonial writer Homi Bhabha. We’re proud to be able to show the image Money Blindness by Accra-based creative Ikon Shepherd. We hope you enjoy this issue.

#18 Science fiction

Beautiful, haunting, thought-provoking … A book I will return to again and again' Bernardine Evaristo