“Britain looks most like itself on an overcast day,” Sheffield-born photographer Johny Pitts says. He shot these three men – and three pigeons – outside partly renovated flats on London’s Jamaica Road in Bermondsey. At the time, he was constantly on the lookout for “big architectural ideas from the postwar period”.
“I was using my phone as a sketchbook to record what I found,” says Pitts, whose work can be seen at the Photographers’ Gallery in London until 24 September. “You’d be surprised how quickly things disappear. Many photographers think capturing a decisive moment is about people, but a lot of the time it’s the street furniture and buildings that can suddenly change and alter the atmosphere that attracted you in the first place.”
He doubts he would have stopped to capture this scene with one of his 15 professional cameras (including a Fujifilm X-Pro3, Ricoh GR III, Konica Hexar and Yashica T4). “I might have been told off by these men if I had pulled out something less subtle,” Pitts notes.
While he sometimes prefers going out to shoot without the distraction of his phone’s other features, when he does use it, he shoots with Instagram sharing in mind, and provides followers with the geolocation. “I like to honour the phone as a device that is more than just a camera, but something connected to satellites and maps. You can search the geotag of this image [lat 51.49843123838731, long –0.061613484250885635] and see what’s there right now. The men will be gone, and there’s a ghostliness to that. But this photo provides a portal.”
English (US)