Nothing Lasts Forever - Peter Mitchell

NOTHING LASTS FOREVER

PETER MITCHELL

A STRANGE AND FAMILIAR WORLD

50 years ago, Peter Mitchell walked into Leeds City Art Gallery and was fortunate to encounter the visionary Sheila Ross, the curator of the Education Gallery, who was so struck by his photographs that she gave him a solo exhibition a year later ‘An Impression of the Yorkshire City of LEEDS’. Fast forward to 2024 and the very same gallery, now called Leeds Art Gallery, is honouring Peter’s remarkable career with a major retrospective exhibition.

‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ is his poetic title for the exhibition and publication, and together they create a timely opportunity to discover, explore and reflect upon key bodies of work by one of the most important colour photographers of the 20th century. Peter is an astute observer, whether he is telling a story from the perspective of an alien explorer in the pioneering ‘A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission’ to that of an historian capturing the demise of Quarry Hill Flats, or the creators of the otherworldly Yorkshire Scarecrows which Geoff Dyer describes as among photography’s most humorous and strange portraits. Peter continues to intrigue us with details of human interest which are intensely personal and somehow timeless, through photography, words, and the objects he has collected over a lifetime.

This publication presents Peter’s photographs to a new generation and shares his unique and compelling vision which has the changing face of Leeds at its heart; its history as witnessed through the ruins of its buildings, the citizens who have lived here and remembering those who stand proudly in their place of work. In the words of Val Williams, Peter is ‘a narrator of how we were, a chaser of a disappearing world’. Nothing lasts forever.

Jane Bhoyroo

Memento Mori: The Flats at Quarry Hill, Leeds

Self Published, 1990

Hardcover in dust-jacket edition of 500

Softcover in dust-jacket edition of 3000

23 x 21 cm

128 pages

Foreword by Bernard Crick

RRB Photobooks, May 2016

Softcover, card in dust-jacket

23 x 21 cm

136 pages

New corrected edition, reset by Alan Rutherford

Peter’s first book. Self-published with an Arts Council grant in an edition of 500 hardbacks and 3000 paperbacks. Both versions had a dust-wrapper. Memento Mori combined original documents, archival photographs, oral history and Peter’s own colour photographs. RRB Photobooks published a new paperback edition with dust-wrapper in 2016. The text was reset by Alan Rutherford and there is a new Afterword by Peter.

“Quarry Hill was right there in the middle of Leeds and by 1936 had become a giant architectural wonder totally alien to the ‘Loiners’ of Leeds. I often walked through the flats and when demolition was imminent I started to photograph the demise of Quarry Hill Flats –for five years! Interest began to grow as to what was so special about the flats and why they were got rid of so completely. Leeds City Art Gallery had just been refurbished, and they chose my photographs for the opening exhibition and the launch of the book ‘Memento Mori’, with thanks to the Arts Council. And Quarry Hill Flats have been with me ever since.”

Peter Mitchell

Strangely Familiar

Nazraeli, July 2013

Hardcover, blue cloth

28.6 x 30.5 cm

68 pages

Introduction by Martin Parr

Twenty-three years after Peter’s first book, this selection of photographs was published in a series edited by Martin Parr. 1500 copies were printed. RRB Photobooks created a special edition of sorts by adding an original signed print to a limited number of copies.

“Martin Parr (who was forever promoting new photography) had been commissioned by Nazraeli Press to select ten photographers, and I was one of them. I designed the book, which was rejected, and then all went quiet for two years. Almost midnight when the phone rang and Chris was liking the images and thought they should be all of Leeds. Oh – and he had left Portland and now had an olive farm near Los Angeles and publishing was done in China. I went over and we had a terrific time and at the end of the week he asked me what the badge was I was wearing. It was my Winged Cobra logo with the slogan ‘We are all heroes of Today’. ‘Let’s stamp them on the book’ he said. A set of rubber stamps were sent to China and the books looked terrific and Chris said ‘brilliant, they will sell straight away’. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because each customer will be buying a limited edition of one’. And he was right!”

Peter Mitchell

Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody

RRB Photobooks, June 2015

Hardcover, blue cloth in dustjacket

23 x 28 cm

132 pages

First Edition of 950 copies including 50 Special Edition copies in Slipcase

Each copy included a 5x5” signed print

“My partner has a cottage in North Yorkshire and much earlier three of us (Martin Parr, Nigel Inglis and myself) had an exhibition at Impressions Gallery under the title of ‘The Derwent’. By coincidence the river that runs through Sheila’s garden, the river Severn, also runs into The Derwent. Originally I only liked places with pavements but Sinnington changed my mind. Almost by accident I seemed to have accumulated several tribes of scarecrows, (they vary from 1975) and RRB Photobooks wanted to use them – but how? Eventually, after much psychology and purpose, we decided on a biography and let the characters natter on about me and the state I’m in. So it was out with my gask mask, ‘Eccles’ miners lamp and baker’s bun and hello Manchester. The scarecrows seemed to me like old friends and after publication it was as if they had all decided to steal away forever.”

RRB Photobooks’ first publication, Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody is an autobiography told through inanimate objects silently observed by scarecrows. Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody boldly marks the passing of time by weaving images of these surreal totems in the landscape amongst those of objects with sentimental value. The combination of personal belongings with scarecrows highlights the quirky and eccentric view Peter has shown throughout his work – the humdrum and mundane becomes weird and wonderful, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. This is a document of both the literal and the allegorical: blank scarecrow faces in empty landscapes with muted skies connect to a bleak pastoral sensibility, while horded things map out Peter’s life chronologically. He says: “Scarecrows have always been a feature of my childhood. I’ve purposefully chosen ones that have no face on them because I didn’t want people to laugh at them but imagine them as people. I’ve paired them with the objects that I’ve got which are my own scruffy little objects - treasured objects I’ve had since I was little. I chose them because I use them everyday. Everyday objects with the figure of Everyman.” The book employs hand-made fonts combined with narratives purposefully jangling and rattling the viewer along with this eclectic panoply of possessions.

Peter Mitchell

A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission

RRB Photobooks, April 2017

Hardcover, navy cloth in printed dustwrapper

24.8 x 27.2 cm

88 pages

First Edition including Special Edition of 100 copies

With an Essay by Val Williams

French Edition published by Editions Clementine de la Feronniere

A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission features photos and portraits, taken in Leeds in the 1970s. The pictures show the traditional urban landscape presented on a background of space charts, the concept being that an alien has landed from Mars and is wandering around Leeds with a degree of surprise and puzzlement. Peter’s groundbreaking show was first presented at the Impressions Gallery of Photography, York, in November 1979, and more recently at Arles in 2016.

“Val Williams asked me to do a show and because I like astronomy, and the Americans had just landed on Mars. I thought I would do something about the wonder of the planet Earth compared with the dusty deserts of Mars. I asked NASA for pictures from the Viking 4 Lander and got the reply that if I sent enough money they might do something – but they could straightaway send me pictures of what was up there already, if I liked. I stuck with my own Viking 4 title and designed mounts for Earth and Mars so that it looked all the same expedition. Quite early on my photographs were taken as being the works of Martians and a public school hired the exhibition from the Arts Council to lecture on the solar system. The school sent a complaint saying the standard of photography must have been taken by a 50 year old man with a ‘Kodak’ camera. I am that man!”

Peter Mitchell

Early Sunday Morning

RRB Photobooks, June 2020

Hardcover, grey-green board

25 x 30 cm

180 pages

First Edition of 1500 copies

including special edition of 100 copies

Each copy included a 5x5” signed print

RRB Photobooks, December 2023

Softcover, printed card

16.5 x 19.8 cm

176 pages

First Edition of 1300 copies includes unlimited Print Edition

Early Sunday Morning is made up of over 90 images, each one selected from a cache of five hundred negatives which had previously sat unseen for over 30 years. Edited and sequenced by John Myers, it shows a different Leeds from Mitchell’s earlier publications. It is neither the sombre look at destruction seen in Memento Mori, nor the detached view of ‘the man from mars’ of A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, but a more intimate document of Mitchell’s own Leeds. The book reveals the layers of the city’s history, exposed by the changes to the urban landscape that epitomised the 1970s and 80s. Hundred-year-old terraces and cobbled streets sit flanked by concrete flats, with newly cleared ground to either side, presented with Mitchell’s typical graphic framing.

‘It is as if Peter Mitchell has taken the atmosphere and mood of Edward Hopper’s famous painting and established it as a matter of documentary fact in the north of England at a moment when collapse can lead to further desolation or possible renewal. So these beautiful pictures are drily drenched in history – social, economic and photographic’

Geoff Dyer

“This is one of those occasions when you think I’m a bit doubtful with these negatives whilst others are claiming wonderful things. Rudi and John Myers worked on the selection and the title was theirs having heard me say ‘I get up early on a Sunday so I can climb on the demolition and the cars and trucks will have gone’. The book was 170 pages thick, very heavy and was being guarded by the ‘Winged Cobra logo’ and John Dyson & Sons (clocks and watches) across the road. Come 2023 I’m at a Photo Festival at Leeds University. It was crowded and signing and selling and I sold the last copy of ‘Early Sunday Morning’. So what does this kid know about taste and art?”

Peter Mitchell

Epilogue

RRB Photobooks, December 2021

Hardcover, sand cloth

28 x 30 cm

100 pages

First Edition of 900 copies includes Special Edition of 100 copies

Preface by Rudi Thoemmes

This book is a sequel to Peter Mitchell’s 1990 publication Memento Mori, which documented the dramatic impact of the Quarry Hill redevelopment project in Leeds. Epilogue contains over 40 new images showing the abandonment and subsequent demolition of the site, adding a poignant final chapter to the 1990 publication and its later facsimile edition.

“I photograph dying buildings and Quarry Hill was terminal by the time I got to it. Times change and I know there was no point in keeping Quarry Hill Flats. But what it stood for might have been worth keeping. An epilogue is a speech or short poem addressed to the spectators by one of the actors after a play is over. Put simply, it is praise for a good performance. Quarry Hill Flats’ performance was short by architectural standards but it still packed a punch. And though ‘Epilogue’ sounds like the ultimate end, it’s not. It will be back – probably with the ghost of Diana Dors, who in my diary for 1957 says ‘She claims to be tired of being a blonde bombshell! Surely not!”

Peter Mitchell

“Peter is quite a brilliant chronicler of life: not just as a photographer but as a social historian and storyteller. Quarry Hill provided him with the perfect ingredients. He combined original documents, archival photographs, oral history, his own observations on utopias and his photographs into what has become a classic recipe of how to use different aspects to illustrate the complexities of change and failure.

Within photography scholarship there is a standard interpretation of Peter’s work as “charming”, best put by Martin Parr in his introduction to Strangely Familiar (2013): ‘The full charm of Mitchell’s work is embodied in images of shops and factories with owners or work force standing proudly in front of their businesses’. Peter’s work about Quarry Hill not only deviates from this but demolishes that particular interpretation of his achievements. Peter himself is indeed the most charming and humble photographer, but these pictures are anything but charming, and they show a much more serious aspect and intent at work” (Preface, Rudi Thoemmes).

Collected Prints and Ephemera

Peter Mitchell’s life and work is not only collected in the pages of his publications. His archive is made up of thousands of negatives, prints, graphic design, typography and objects, spilling out from the ‘Winged Cobra Workshop’ through his home.

The collected objects, combining modern prints and newly unearthed negatives with childhood magazines and toys, artwork by Mitchell’s partner Sheila and items scavanged from across his home city of Leeds, including pieces of the Ghost train that appears on the cover of this book, form a biography of sorts, forming a picture of the man behind the photographs. They have a life of their own, ‘Everyday objects with the figure of everyman’, in them we see our own memories as much as those of the place they inhabit.

Though I don’t collect anything I have accrued a strange range of objects that at times almost speak to me. There’s no gold, designer labels or exquisite craftsmanship or rare value attached to these things but these things are very attached to me and more, they have done great service in their usefulness to me.

Peter Mitchell

‘This is where you’re going to have trouble really, because several people started to do something on me and then they sort of got lost,’ Peter Mitchell tells me early on in our long looping conversation, at his house in Leeds. It makes me laugh but it doesn’t fill me with confidence, though perhaps it’s best understood as an insight. Mitchell’s work is all about trying to find one’s bearings, it seems to me, and the difficulty – or even impossibility - of doing so in a universe beyond human comprehension. There’s a streak of absurdism in his strange and familiar world, an awareness of alternative readings, or hubris, or the ends of Empires and lives; the same sensitivity also suggests something about photography, and how we understand images. Maybe it’s ok to get lost with Mitchell. In fact maybe that’s better than thinking you know where you are.

It does make charting his work daunting though; it’s not obvious what to include or discard from the continuum of his life. As he implies with the title of his 2015 book, Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody, one man’s junk can easily be another one’s gold. Some Thing Means Everything gathers photographs of the apparently random items he’s collected over the years in fact, a vast number of which still live in his house. We speak upstairs on the first floor, because the rooms underneath are floor-to-ceiling full of stuff. But the front cover of Some Thing Means Everything features a map of the stars which, like any map, picks out certain salient facts; it’s partial but also comfortingly clear.

Val Williams has described Mitchell as ‘a proponent of the picaresque’, in his book A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, 2017; he’s a proponent of the episodic, that’s to say, of the usually humorous early novels which typically follow a roguish working-class hero’s adventures, but circle round rather than following a linear path.

Popular in the Age of Reason, then again with 20th century postmodernism, they suggest alternative perspectives and approaches, gathering up bursts of facts rather than progressing along a trajectory. They also suggest a way to think about Mitchell and his work; his 1990 photobook, Memento Mori – The Flats at Quarry Hill, Leeds freely mixes chronologies, for example, combining his photographs with archive images, diary entries, newspaper reports, and architectural plan. A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission plays fast and loose with location, meanwhile, mixing documentary shots of Leeds with other English cities plus images from Mars.

The title of the latter is a reference to Jorge Luis Borges’ essay A New Refutation of Time, which was written between 1944 and 46, and which draws on 17th and 18th century Empiricism to deny there’s an external temporal flow. Borges’ essay proceeds in a playful way, though he concludes that denying temporal succession, the self, or the astronomical universe, ‘are secret consolations’. Post-modernism and wacky early novels suggest ways to understand understanding, to see that our maps are contingent and could be done differently.

To start somewhere – to start like a picaresque novel – Peter Mitchell was born in Eccles, near Manchester in 1943. He’s not really a northerner though. His family ‘evacuated to London because of the war’ he tells me – mysteriously, given that people generally evacuated out of the city. His father was a painter-decorator, a union man and ‘outspoken socialist’; his mother was Italian, though he tells me she was ‘only Italian as a baby’. Born in Rome and therefore registered as an alien in the Second World War, she had to check in weekly with the police. The Mitchells landed in Abbotshall Road, Catford, south-east London, by coincidence just down the road from my house.

Mitchell looks amazed when I tell him, but then in A New Refutation Borges thinks of coincidences as examples of non-linear time. ‘Let us consider a life in which repetitions abound: my life, for instance,’ he writes, and Mitchell has also encountered many coincidences. As a young man he bought a winged cobra brooch at the Portobello Road flea market, wearing it for years before re-finding it on a warehouse in Leeds. Photographing a group of women in front of this flamboyant workplace, he later discovered he’d shot two of them elsewhere at another time. ‘For me, photography is all about coincidences,’ he told The Guardian in 2022.

From my vantage point 80 years on, I can tell you that Catford is a bit down-at-heel, once bordering on genteel but long since faded and [relatively] cheap. Another famous former inhabitant is Spike Milligan, who grew up near Mitchell ten years before; ‘God Save the King / But God help the rest of us,’ wrote Milligan in his poem “Catford 1933”, before setting up The Goon Show, which inspired Monty Python, which in turn inspired Mitchell too. Catford has never been at the heart of the establishment, which is why it has perhaps always had an alternative, bohemian air. It wasn’t the worst hit during the war but still many homes were bombed, including two major incidents either end of Mitchell’s childhood road.

Mitchell must have grown up seeing these sites, because it was years before they were cleared; he tells me he’s a child of the 1940s and 50s, and remembers seeing the old air raid shelters being destroyed, and in Some Thing Means Everything includes a photograph of a gas mask kept all these years. ‘…gas masks and goggles were standard playthings throughout the forties and early fifties,’ he writes. I imagine growing up in this way must have been striking, a lived experience of the adults getting it catastrophically wrong; if Milligan’s wartime

experiences played their part in his ‘downfall’, as he wrote, imagine seeing all that as a kid.

Elsewhere Mitchell has written about his father’s love of his garden and chickens, but this passion must also have helped supplement their food. Rationing remained in place long after the war, in fact bread rationing was only introduced in 1946. So ravaged was Britain’s economy, that food rationing only stopped in 1954, when Mitchell was around 12 years old. ‘When I look back, I love to think of myself as a Sixties hippie,’ he told the Financial Times in 2017. ‘But really am a child of the 1950s. Sheila won’t believe me that bread used to be rationed.’

As a child Mitchell was a fan of I-Spy books, which were distributed by The News Chronicle paper; based around certain topics, such as London or roads or ponds, they challenged users to tick off certain sights. They gave a training in looking, that’s to say, but they also arranged their own order of things, a mapping backed up by a clear hierarchy. They were dreamt up by a former headmaster styled ‘the Big Chief I-Spy’; members of the I-Spy tribe had a secret code, which Mitchell still remembers. Mitchell was a keen scribbler, he says, writing for the school magazine and starting a diary when he was six. He’s kept up this diary ever since, and used extracts from it in his books. ‘I used to write up to 1000 words a night, personal stuff,’ he tells me. ‘Well this was a way, I now see, this was a way of coping.’

His childhood is amazingly fresh in his mind, a topic he circles back to in his work and our conversation; he shows me old family photographs, him cute and his mother strikingly handsome. His playthings remain alive for him too, in the way that dolls and bears are alive for kids; one of his favourite toys was a little rubber frog, he tells me, which

you could animate into life. ‘There was a craze for these things,’ he tells me. ‘If you squeeze a bubble in your pocket the frog jumps.’ ‘I have accrued a strange range of objects that at times almost speak to me,’ he writes in Some Thing Means Everything. Many of these toys are still knocking around in his house, gathering dust downstairs while he’s decamped to the first floor or his partner’s home in the country.

It could look like hoarding, but then who’s to say what’s important and what’s junk, what’s a random ragbag and what’s an important archive. His grew up close to the Horniman Museum, an extremely eccentric 19th century collection given an air of respectability by virtue of its owner’s wealth. A New Refutation includes a photograph of a class of kids in front of the Horniman Museum, which Mitchell shot in 1979. ‘I loved this place as a nipper and still do,’ he writes. Though the insides have changed and not for the better.’

The Horniman includes a hilariously mis-stuffed walrus, over-padded by a Victorian taxidermist; A New Refutation also includes a shot of a large, anatomically incorrect dinosaur model, one of several in Crystal Palace, another park in south-east London. ‘I remember this creature when it used to stalk through the dense undergrowth with its skin all peeling off,’ he writes in A New Refutation. ‘The nice thing about it is that Waterhouse Hawkings (with few bones to go on) didn’t get these animals right, thus making them truly fantastic creatures.’ His caption labels these creatures “Kings of the Earth – Do They Rule For Ever? London, 1979”. Science and evidence can get you so far, it seems, but ultimately you could still be making it up. And any good scientific theory can be overturned.

Mitchell’s childhood segued into a happy youth; he tells me about scooter trips, about Catford cinemas showing risqué flicks, and a

shop up the road that sold condoms. There’s a photograph of it in A New Refutation, titled “Mrs McArthy & her daughter. Saturday 7 June 1975”. Sangley Road, London. ‘It had a window full of skeletons and things like that,’ he tells. ‘Memento Mori, yeah go have some fun boys, because one day you’re dead.’ One day not only can your findings be overturned, perhaps, they can die with you.

Skeletons are an ongoing theme in Mitchell’s work, in fact, popping up in an x-ray at the end of Memento Mori, and an unpublished series on a Ghost Train. We forget about it day-to-day, but this symbol of death always lurks within, inside under the flesh. Actually Mitchell’s father died unexpectedly young, suddenly having a heart attack at the age of 61; somehow suddenly he’s talking to me about euthanasia, about how ‘there’s quite a bit of shouting that goes on, it’s not as easy as it sounds because the body is resolute.’ Val Williams writes that Mitchell is ‘perhaps not as jolly as we thought’, and it seems to me he’s not jolly at all. His life is shot through with awareness of death, like the black humour of Spike Milligan or any other good absurdist.

‘Everyone left school at 15/16’, Mitchell writes in Some Thing Means Everything – after which he headed north to Hampstead Heath, then a bohemian centre rather than unaffordably posh. He lived in circumstances that sound straightened but fun, sharing a house – and one toilet – with five others, and training as a cartographic draftsman, working for the civil service in the Ministry of Housing and Local Government in Whitehall. The latter also strikes me as interesting and relevant. He learned to make maps and architectural drawings, a skill and interest he’s retained, with Memento Mori including blueprint plans of the Quarry Hill flats, and Some Thing Means Everything a neat drawing of his radically messy house. Stripping away details to show the bare bones of a place, these plans are another kind of skeleton.

It also strikes me as funny that Mitchell worked for the British government, at that time losing its Empire but little of its selfappointed importance; party to some of the Establishment’s inner workings, he even had to sign the Official Secrets Act. ‘To this day ministry values have stayed with me,’ he writes in Some Thing Means Everything, which seems surprising, but then there’s an establishment edge to his ‘Winged Cobra Workshop’, and he gave it a rubber stamp. As with setting up his own collection, there’s a sense he’s at the centre of his own world, setting up his own archives and institutions.

These so-called ministry values also shade 1960s counterculture though, into the spoofing that runs through Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. ‘By yet another weird coincidence I worked on the drawings for a large town and ten years later not only do live there but Leeds seems to have adopted ideas from the actual report,’ Mitchell writes in Some Thing Means Everything, his tongue seemingly firmly in cheek.

He was also actively involved in counter-cultural activities, attending CND rallies in Trafalgar Square; by 1967 when he was about 24, he’d had enough and decided to ditch the steady job in favour of art college. Winning a place at Hornsea College of Art in Crouch End, north London, he arrived just as the students were radicalising. Smaller scale but not unlike “les envenements” in France, inspired by Marxism and the Situationists, this movement culminated in a sit-in in 1968. A poster from the fall-out has made it into Mitchell’s collection, featuring a skeleton, and anti-establishment satire; “Harold Skeleton and his company of performing public relations officers presents Mr Loadov Fibbs,” reads the text, accompanying a cartoony man in a suit.

The poster is attributed to George Snow, a student eventually expelled

from Hornsea, but Mitchell was also into screen printing, that’s to say into making this kind of poster or leaflet, the alternative news and ads. He was also studying typography and graphic design, like Nick Wright, one of Hornsea’s radical student leaders. I imagine he was well-versed in the protests, though he gently satirises them too, writing ‘I had a terrific time there but the exact nature of the uprising escapes me these days,’ in Some Thing Means Everything. Perhaps if you’re really anti-establishment you’re wary of all politics, even those campaigns that question authority.

Studying typography seems interesting too, as it’s the art and technique of selecting and displaying type; it’s concerned with how words look, rather than what they say. It’s a look at the signifier rather than what’s signified, that’s to say, detaching the physical sign from what its arbitrarily come to communicate. It suggests a collapse of values, in which one set of meanings could easily be replaced. If, as Roland Barthes suggested in 1961, the photograph is ‘a message without a code’, perhaps it isn’t so different. The captions Mitchell attaches to his images are often humorous, diaristic and clearly subjective, they suggest another caption might easily do too.

Perhaps this sense of contingency was further suggested by travelling, because by this time Mitchell was taking trips across Europe; in 1969 he hitched across the US with his girlfriend, at the height of the hippy movement. In 1972 he left art college and visited friends who were squatting in Leeds, never left, and settled into half the whole house

I visited. Getting a job as a truck driver to pay the bills, he planned to become a fine-art silk-screen maker; setting up The Winged Cobra Workshop, he gave it the motto ‘We Are All Heroes of Today’. The sentiment is both egalitarian and a riff on ‘Homes for Heroes’, the call for decent housing post-World War One.

The early 1970s were a particular time in Britain, the cultural radicalism that had seeped into Hornsea also leading to political clashes; the miners and railway workers went on strike, and by 1973 the Conservative government was rationing power via a three-day week. By 1974’s general election, the Tory’s slogan was ‘Who governs Britain?’, and Mitchell has described this period as like war time. Maybe it was particularly shocking in Leeds. ‘When I arrived in Leeds in the early seventies [slum] clearances seemed to be in progress over the entire city,’ he writes in Memento Mori

And Mitchell had a ringside seat, his trucking job taking him all over the city; he started to shoot what remained of these ‘dying buildings’, finding that ‘Sunday proved the traffic-free moments to be more exploratory,’ as he writes of Early Sunday Morning. The title of this book is pleasingly cyclical, as in Borges, though the images suggest a downward spiral, showing buildings on their way out, and sometimes the people associated with them. Many of the shots are of old pubs and small businesses, with appealing painted signs and facades.

By this time Mitchell had got to know Sheila Ross, who ran the education department of Leeds City Art Gallery; in 1974 he walked into her gallery with some images printed in Boots [the chemist], suggesting she might be interested. 1975 was the European Architectural Year, which aimed to develop a policy to protect architectural heritage, and Ross thought his images would be an interesting counterpoint to the main exhibition, which showed Leeds’ Victorian and city heritage. She arranged Mitchell’s first solo show.

Mitchell gave the exhibition an anachronistic title and printed the leaflet himself in The Winged Cobra Workshop, choosing ‘the style of English Enlightenment typographic title page – Newton, Harvey,

Hooke et al’, as he writes in Some Thing Means Everything. The text reads:

An Impression of the Yorkshire City of LEEDS

A plain persons Guide to the discovering and navigating of the City

By the less dramatic but equally interesting Features of the Landscape.

There is much more on this title page, around his ‘PHOTOGRAPHS in Colour and Personal Observations’, and the idea was that ‘there are all these little tiny things that you notice when you’re a truck driver and they are just as interesting as all this other stuff in the world’, he told It’s Nice That. Again, Mitchell insisted his vision was valid; he also linked with Enlightenment Empiricism, based on direct observation and therefore scientific but also subjective. Mitchell created a map or a guide to Leeds, that’s to say but happily pointed out its partiality. Knowing something, after all, isn’t the same as knowing everything.

The exhibition was a success, a curator telling Mitchell ‘I like the photographs – forget the screen prints’, and from then on he took his images more seriously, starting a long project on Leeds’ ailing Quarry Hill modernist estate. Mitchell says it was good timing, that his moment arrived just as ‘the UK had discovered photography as an art form’, but he wasn’t exactly in step with it. The 1970s were a Golden Age for British documentary photography, and one of its main proponents, Martin Parr, is one of Mitchell’s biggest champions; Parr describes Mitchell as ‘a fine documentary photographer’ in his introduction to Strangely Familiar but while he is, he’s also unorthodox.

His exhibition A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission organised by Val Williams at Impressions Gallery in York in 1979, was the first colour show in a British photography gallery; it also included images from Mars, beamed to earth by the Viking landers. Mitchell was inspired to add space charts to his own photographs, fake coordinates and measurements applying an alien-eye, quasi scientific view to his photographs. ‘This show was so far ahead of its time that no one knew exactly what to say or how to react, apart from with total bewilderment,’ Parr wrote for Photoworks in 2013.

Combining his photographs with the Mars landers’, Mitchell says something about the camera’s vision, and it seems to me A New Refutation refutes that apparently objective vision. The camera puts those who use it at a distance, removing them from the frame and throwing them into observation; Martin Jay, born a year after Mitchell, spoke of ‘scopic regimes’ in the 1980s, the ‘distanciating vision’ developed in the Enlightenment and materialised via photography. For Jay this vision relates to a colonial way of seeing, of perceiving the world as resources; a similar idea features in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, broadcast on BBC2 in 1972, which suggests images as a type of stock-taking. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, goes further, considering the invention of the Panopticon in the 18th century, and the imposition of a controlling surveillance view.

Mitchell’s photographs evoke this vision, and he shot them from the top of a step ladder, which adds to their sense of a survey; he also created quasi-official documents for the exhibition, giving visitors a ‘Mission Control’ entrance pass, stamped with the year and The Winged Cobra emblem. But this entrance pass seems to me another satirical gesture, one more concerned with anti-establishment than imposing an authority, and Mitchell’s images also sometimes include

people, shown small in the frame in front of their workplaces or homes. His shots are early examples of ‘environmental portraits’, of the individual enmeshed in their surroundings, and as such they suggest people can be subject to forces bigger than them, such as deindustrialisation, or the destruction of Leeds. But they also suggest that an objective eye is a fiction, that we each have our own subjective view, whichever side of the camera we are.

Mitchell also included lengthy captions with his images, which have the eccentric personal feel of an 18th century journal or diary.

‘St Botolph’s Graveyard, London, 1979,’ reads one. ‘Working class heroes’ graves. Pictures like this come about through having been a compulsive I-Spyer in one’s infancy.’ Mitchell and his subjects aren’t objective, and they aren’t objects or aliens. They’re individuals and he’s spoken with many of them, his captions recording most of their names and a few details. ‘Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but am the fire,’ writes Borges in A New Refutation of Time. ‘The world, alas, is real; I, alas, am Borges.’

As with Mitchell’s childhood toys and collection of stuff, it seems places are as alive as people to him. Mitchell references the name of a boulder on Mars for example, ‘Big Val’, and A New Refutation also includes his photograph of the Quarry Hill estate in Leeds, soon to be demolished but given a voice. Attaching morse code flags to its onceproud poles, Mitchell ventriloquises its farewell, ‘GOODBYE WORLD’. His approach seems close to a kind of animism, which considers the environment in terms of living beings, not objects or resources. Perhaps it’s not surprising that another long-term project looks at scarecrows, inanimate figures which seem nonetheless convincingly,

alive. ‘To me they’re friends,’ writes Mitchell, in a collection of these photographs published as postcards in 2015; these images also punctuate Some Thing Means Everything Mitchell’s photographs of the Ghost Train occupy similar ground, wild rides on which inanimate objects can seem disconcertingly menacing. Ghost stories and horror are a point at which established reason can seem to break down; in the 18th century, the Age of Reason tipped over into the Sublime, those scary, awe-inspiring moments in which we perceive the world far beyond human attempts at mapping it.

Early 19th century writers such Shelley, and especially Mary Shelley, with her pitiful Frankenstein’s monster, considered moments in which order falls apart; for them this could be reason, but it could also be political order. And that’s the key point to Memento Mori, Mitchell’s magnum opus, which is ostensibly about the Quarry Hill flats, built with great optimism and fanfare in the 1930s then infamous by the 1950s and demolished by the late 1970s. Actually it’s about hubris, and the endings of eras. Bernard Crick’s foreword includes Shelley’s poem, “Ozymandias the Egyptian”, describing a fallen, once-great ruler; Shelley wrote it just after the Peterloo Massacre, in which a British Empire high on its own power mowed down innocent men, women and children protesting for the right to vote.

Mitchell for his part includes a poem by Robbie Burns in Memento Mori, the Scottish poet who influenced Shelley and more; Mitchell quotes Burns’ “To A Mouse”, which points out that the schemes of both mice and men ‘gang aft a-gley’. Meanwhile an illustration of a sundial on the back cover bears the motto SOLI DEO OMNIS GLORIAT, [TO GOD ALONE BE THE GLORY OF ALL] plus ‘BOAST not thyself of tomorrow for on thine eyelids is the shadow of death’. Both texts suggest a need for humility, an awareness of the human frailty that finishes empires and our lives.

Mitchell suggests a certain contingency to reality, ‘the microbes of time’ are at work, he says, and all that is solid melting. Visiting on 24 March 1978 he finds the Quarry Hill site is ‘mostly cleared, does look massive but its unique presence has long gone. It’s like the back lot of a film set’; the unique presence is another near personification, suggesting a more respectful way to interact with this beast, but the film set suggests something temporary. There’s a feeling that nothing is really for sure, despite the confidence of authorities who say estates should be constructed, then equally confidently say they should be demolished.

It’s left to the freethinkers to voice something different, to be out of step with the times and rewarded with the seemingly eccentric; as Mitchell records in the book, ‘Alison Ravetz, lecturer in architectural studies at Leeds Polytechnic, says some pioneers and activists stubbornly remember and maintain that it was, and is, and could be something more successful.’ Mitchell, for his part, carefully gathers evidence suggesting this scheme was never brilliant or terrible, but always somewhere in between. The creation of meaning isn’t easy, particularly with photographs, messages without a code, so Mitchell attaches his own readings, in captions, titles and texts. In a wider sense though, he’s suggesting you think for yourself.

We are all heroes of today, as his motto puts it, so you can assess these fragments yourself; and his wider oeuvre includes other, similar encouragements. ‘To thine own self be true’ reads a piece of pottery shown in Some Thing Means Everything; ‘I was an astute individual who spoke with his own mouth,’ reads a quote in the same book. The latter is written in Egyptian hieroglyphics, taken from Tutankhamun’s

tomb, and is used under a photograph of Mitchell’s own studio, in very same house where I’m chatting with him. Mitchell is such an individual, or at least tries to be, and the work he made in this studio helped him speak.

This essay is my particular take on Mitchell, the one that make sense to me here and now. Another course could easily be charted. But perhaps the conclusion is less important than the search because, as in existentialism, it’s about looking for meaning, not finding a meaning per se. Maybe this is where Mitchell’s diaries have been helpful, materialising his particular perspective on the world; I too am an inveterate diary-writer, and have been since was a kid. Perhaps it is harder to get lost when you’re following your own nose, though in my case this path led towards Catford, not away.

Writing has become my way, but I can see photography is also useful to document your own time and place. Quite literally recording your perspective at a particular juncture, it plots your position in time and space. So though photography has been linked with ‘distanciating vision’, with a scientific, or surveying, or even colonial view, for me Mitchell’s work suggests something different. It demonstrates everyone is a watcher with their own view, even if they’re scarecrows or buildings. It suggests various subjectivities, an anarchic workingclass boy as much as the British government or NASA.

Mitchell is now part of the photographic establishment. A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission was shown at Arles in 2016, RRB Photobooks has been publishing his work since 2015, and he’s featured by newspapers such as The Guardian and the FT He has a retrospective at Leeds Art Gallery – something he’s particularly pleased with, he tells me, because that’s where he had his first solo show. Where once he was in the small gallery, an interesting addition to the main event, he’s now the main event. But it’s not a position he easily accepts. Mitchell’s suggested titles for this retrospective are “Going, Going, Gone”, or “Once you saw itand now it is gone”, or “No Thing Lasts Forever”, which could refer to what he has photographed, or himself, or his work; far from being the establishment, he suggests, he’ll soon be on his way out. ‘Time is a fire that consumes, but I am the fire,’ wrote Borges in A New Refutation of Time; ‘Nothing beside remains,’ wrote Shelley in

Born into the destruction of World War Two, Mitchell lived to see the sci-fi optimism of the 1951 Festival of Britain, and the dismantling of the British Empire; the launch of Concorde in 1969, and the UK’s de-industrialisation. One of Mitchell’s photographs of the Quarry Hill, Leeds shows the supersonic airliner in its heyday, poised to break new boundaries in our mastery of time and space, depicted via cartoony, triumphant wallpaper. His image shows this wallpaper tired and sad, however, soon to be destroyed just as its referent. Mitchell went on Concorde in 2003, he tells me, when it was nearing the close of its life. ‘I dressed up, but everyone else was getting drunk and couldn’t stay upright,’ he tells. ‘It was like the Empire ending.’

Captions

3 Francis Gavan, Ghost Train Man, Woodhouse Moor, Leeds, 1977

6 Adler Gabriele 25 Portable, 1984

9 X-rays, from Memento Mori 1990 & 2016

10i Memento Mori, self-published 1990 & RRB Photobooks, 2016, cover

10ii Memento Mori, self-published 1990 & RRB Photobooks, 2016, p30-31

11 Memento Mori, self-published 1990 & RRB Photobooks, 2016, p84-85

13 Noel and his Lads, Demolition Men, Neilson House, Quarry Hill, Leeds, Summer 1978

15 York and Moynihan Houses, Quarry Hill Flats, from the south-east, 1978

16 The Garden of Rest (a.k.a. The Village Green), Quarry Hill Flats, looking east, 1978

17 Thoresby House, Quarry Hill Flats, from the west, 1978

19 Neilson House, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978

21 Wright House from the east, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978

23 Knitted Hasselblad camera. Sheila Ross, 1979

24 John Dyson & Sons, Clockmakers, Lower Briggate, Leeds, Winter 1973

25 Strangely Familiar, Nazraeli, 2013, cover

27 Mr. and Mrs. Hudson, by the old Seacroft Chapel, York Road, Leeds, 1974

28 Tetley Malthouse, Mill Street, junction of Cross Mill Street, Leeds, Winter 1973

29 Edna, George & Pat, Butchers, Waterloo Road, junction with Jack Lane, Leeds, Spring 1977

31 Francis Gavan, Ghost Train Ride, Woodhouse Moor, Leeds, Spring 1986

33 ‘Rave On’, Harehills Terrace, corner of Elford Road, Leeds, 1970s

35 Sir Yank’s Records (& Heavy Disco), 49 Gathorne Street, Leeds, Summer 1976

36 The Racing Pigeon Shop, 12 Blake Grove, Leeds, Summer 2009

37 Grimes & Wood, Motor Engineers, Brumfits Yard, Craven Road, Leeds, Autumn 1979

39 Trinity Methodist Church, Rounday Road, Leeds, Autumn 1978

41 Francis Gavan, Ghost Train Ride, Pottery Fields, Leeds, Spring 2006

43 Milk jug. Devon Motto Ware, 1952

44i Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody, RRB Photobooks, 2015, dustjacket

44ii 5x5” print in negative bag, with hand-made font sticker, included with Some Thing Means Everything to Somebod y, RRB Photobooks, 2015

45 Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody, RRB Photobooks, 2015, p65-66

47 Scarecrow 11

48 Scarecrow 16

49 Scarecrow 38

51 Scarecrow 28

53 Scarecrow 26

55 Scarecrow 32

56 Scarecrow 57

57 Scarecrow 20

59 Scarecrow 30

61 Entrance badge for A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, 1979

62i A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, RRB Photobooks, April 2017, Dustwrapper

62ii A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, RRB Photobooks, April 2017, p16-17

63 A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, RRB Photobooks, April 2017, p30-31

65 Scott, Dean, Neil & Gaudy the dog, 40 Westmoreland Street, Sheffield, 1978

67 Two anonymous ladies, Tivoli Cinema, Acre Road, Leeds. Taken from Sisson’s Lane, 1976

69 The people of Kingston Racing Motors, Olinda terrace, Leeds, 1975

70 Eric Massheder, Vulcan Street, Leeds, 1975

71 Bill Hemmings, Thornville Road, Sheffield, 1978

73 Mrs. McArthy & her daughter, 17 Sangley Road, Catford, London, 1975

74 Opticians, London, 1975

75 Mr. Costas, 17B Stroud Green Road, London, 1979

77 ABC (Aerated Bread Company offices), 17-21 Camden Road, London, 1979

78 Ready mixed Concrete Ltd, Elland Road, Leeds, 1977

79 The Sir Yank’s Heavy Disco, Harehills Avenue, Leeds, 1978

81 Max Babbin, 2A Vulcan Street, Leeds, 1979

83 Leeds General Infirmary clock, W. Potts & Sons Ltd. c.1900

84i Early Sunday Morning, RRB Photobooks, 2020, cover

84ii 5x5” print in negative bag, included with Early Sunday Morning, RRB Photobooks, 2020

85 Early Sunday Morning, RRB Photobooks, 2020, p66-67

87 The Sun Hotel, 134 Church Street, Hunslet, Leeds, late 1970s

88 The Queen Pub, 134 Oldfield Lane, Wortley, Leeds, 1970s

89 WM. Ogden & Co, 77 Kirkstall Road, Leeds, 1970s

91 Beetham’s Cash Stores, 98 Church Street, Hunslet, Leeds, 1970s

92 9-17 Howden Place, Hyde Park, Leeds, 1970s

93 Westlock Grove, Leeds, 1970s

95 Concorde Wallpaper, Devon Road, 1970s

97 Nosey Twat, 8 Sackville Street, Leeds, 1980s

98 Billboard on the side of the Pavillion Cinema, Stanningly Road at junction of Half Mile Lane, Leeds, 1986

99 284 Burley Road, Leeds, 1970s

101 J Marsland and Sons Ltd, timber merchants, Lisbon Street, corner of Skinner Street, Leeds, 1970s

103 Aerial Photographs of the Sheepscar Standing Stones

104i Epilogue, RRB Photobooks, 2021, cover

104ii Epilogue, RRB Photobooks, 2021, p73

105 Epilogue, RRB Photobooks, 2021, p46-47

107 Thoresby and Victoria Houses, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978

108 The Kitson House telephone, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978

109 Wright House, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978

111 Wright House, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978

113 York House, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978

114 Priestly House, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978

115 Priestly House, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978

117 Moynihan House, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978

119 Touring Crate for A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, 1979

120 Stained glass window, Sheila Ross, 1982

121i Diaries over a long period of time, some of them

121ii We Are All Heroes of Today, winged cobra iron-on badge, 2008

122 News Chronicle I-Spy No.11, 1954

123 Old Kent Road, London, 1979

124 Hyde Park Picture House, Brudenell Road, Leeds, 1970s

125 Plimsolls silkscreen print, Peter Mitchell, 1970

126i Now You See Them, Soon You Won’t Exhibition poster, 1978

126ii Fragments against Ruin, Exhibition poster, 1981

127i An Impression of the Yorkshire City of Leeds, exhibition poster, 1975

127ii Strangely Familiar Exhibition poster, 2008

128 Aerial view of the Quarry Hill Flats, 1938

129 ‘How many Aunties?’, Back Hares Mount, Leeds, 1978

130 Mrs. Clayton and Mrs. Collins, Summer, 1974

131 Construction Worker, limited edition hand-print

132i Memento Mori, self-published 1990 & RRB Photobooks, 2016, back cover illustration

132ii Quarry Hill Day, 6 March 1978. The flags read GOODBYE WORLD

133 Memorials from fans at Elland Road, following the death of Billy Bremner, 1997

143 The winged cobra workshop

With thanks

To Jane Bhoyroo, Nigel Walsh and the team at Leeds Art Gallery for their diligence and vision

To Rudi Thoemmes for not retiring just yet

To Tom Groves, Louis Little and Alec Aarons for their expertise

To Kirsten Jensen, Erik Tarp and the team at Narayana Press for their skill and guidance

To Mark Freer for his help identifying lost locations

To Becky Palfery, Geoff Dyer, John Myers, Martin Parr and Val Williams for their generous support over the years

To Sheila and her girls for their support and advice

And of course, to Peter Mitchell for his not untested trust

Published to celebrate Peter Mitchell’s Retrospective Exhibition at the Leeds Art Gallery, May – October 2024

RRB Photobooks, May 2024

Photographs © Peter Mitchell

Foreword by Jane Bhoyroo

Essay © Diane Smyth

Edit and Sequencing by Josephine Atkinson

Design by Jessamine Thoemmes-Tondowski

Production by Bread & Butter, Bristol UK and Fresh Aire, Leeds UK

Printed at Narayana Press, Denmark

ISBN 978-1-7385163-0-8

rrbphotobooks.com