Johny Pitts
Born into the 20th Century /// Inheritor of the 21st Century
In 2018, when I was living in Le Panier, the oldest district in Marseille (and indeed France), working on my book Afropean, I stumbled upon two big crates of Kodachrome slides being thrown out on the sidewalk. The young woman throwing the crates out said I could take them. Because I was so busy piecing the final touches of my book together, it wasn’t until three months later that I got around to looking at the slides, and was amazed by what I saw. Here was an archive of beautiful full colour photographs documenting the city of Marseille from 1969 to 1990. Aside from the surprisingly skilled technical elements, what most amazed me was their link to my own work at the time, a document of one of Europe’s most multicultural cities on full display. West African, North African and working class white kids depicted on outings in the surrounding areas; mountain walks, football tournaments, and street carnivals, and showing Le Panier as it used to be; poor but with a strong community built from centuries of immigration.
As soon as I saw the quality of the photographs I raced back to the place I found them, but the woman, along the store she worked at, had closed down. The only indication I have of who took the images, is an old Algerian man who runs a small convenience store, and recognised some of the faces in the pictures. Many are no longer with us, but some, he said, still live in Le Panier. As we looked at the photographs together an amazing amount of local knowledge and gossip emerged, and my plan is to ‘activate’ the images by getting the local community to write down notes in response to them.