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.
