‘I photograph dying buildings.’
(Peter Mitchell)
Pioneer of documentary colour photography
Peter Mitchell is widely regarded as a path-breaking documentary photography who pioneered the use of colour in social photography in the 1970s and ’80s. His landmark show, ‘A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission’, staged at the Impressions Gallery in York in 1979, was the first colour photography show at a British photography gallery by a British photographer and strongly influenced other colour photographers working in the same field.
Mrs McArthy and her daughter, Sangley Road, Catford, London by Peter Mitchel (1975) © Peter Mitchell
Derelict Leeds
Born in Manchester in 1943, Mitchell’s family moved to London where he grew up and studied photography, which explains why some of the early photos on the show are from London – Catford, the Old Kent Road, the Horniman Museum. In 1972 he visited Leeds and ended up moving there. He arrived at a time when the city was badly rundown, with the old Victorian slums being torn down but also a lot of mid-20th century social housing falling into disrepair and needing to be demolished.
The result was a cityscape in distress, strewn with derelict and orphan buildings. Mitchell made his name developing a style of taking hundreds of vivid documentary snaps of these knackered old buildings – the last house in a terrace, houses next to Victorian factories, old pubs or grocery shops, boarded-up cinemas – and the mostly working class people who grimly hung on in them.
Max Babbin, Vulcan Street, Leeds by Peter Mitchell © Peter Mitchell
‘A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission’
In fact Mitchell’s images are a little more curated than this suggests. They are frequently gathered together into projects. I’ve mentioned his most famous one ‘A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission’, presented at the Impressions Gallery in York in 1979.
In the mid-1970s NASA’s Viking Lander 3 and 4 space probes had recently landed on Mars and sent back the first ever images of the red planet in all its staggering dullness. Mitchell had the bright idea of presenting his images of devastated Leeds as if they were images sent back to some alien planet from a space probe which had landed on earth. Hence the jokey frames to otherwise common-or-garden colour photos. These frames are ‘space charts’, black with white markings indicating degrees west or east, as if attached to highly technical survey diagrams. Here’s a video showing someone leafing through the book of the project where you can clearly see how each photo is embedded in quite obtrusive ‘space charts’.
The concept is quite entertaining for the first five minutes but hardly earth shattering and quite quickly you learn to ignore them and just enjoy his cracking photos.
‘Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody’
Another series, titled ‘Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody’, consists of a sequence of scarecrows. Mitchell explained that ‘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.’
Scarecrow 28 by Peter Mitchell © Peter Mitchell
Ghost Train Man
Another series is devoted to Francis Gavan, the Ghost Train Man. This fellow created a home-made ghost train ride and toured it round the North in the later 197os.
Francis Gavan, Ghost Train Ride, Woodhouse Moor, Leeds, Spring by Peter Mitchell (1986) © Peter Mitchell
The little Ghost Ride section is jokily presented with a trio of children’s toy black rubber bats tacked to the wall above one of the ‘spooky’ images. In fact, as you can see, stripped of the humorous paraphernalia, this is another of his images of the perky but sad seediness of English life, which always seems exaggerated in the North.
Installation view of ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ by Peter Mitchell at the Photographers’ Gallery showing the Ghost Ride photos (photo by the author)
Quarry Hill
And a separate room is devoted to his awesome series chronicling the demolition of the enormous Quarry Hill estate of flats. This had been a pioneer of modernist design when it was erected in the 1930s but, just 30 years later, had fallen into dereliction and so was slowly destroyed and pulled down, giving Mitchell hundreds of golden opportunities for ghostly shots of abandoned interiors, general views of the stricken buildings, random items left standing amid the detritus, and even a shot of the proud demolition team posing proudly in front of their rubbly handiwork.
Installation view of ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ by Peter Mitchell at the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the Quarry Hill photos (photo by the author)
The demolition took a surprising five years, and Mitchell’s project work on it didn’t come to fruition till he published his book on the subject, titled ‘Memento Mori: The Flats at Quarry Hill Leeds,’ in 1990.
Sense of humour
What I haven’t managed to convey so far is Mitchell’s sense of humour. There’s an alcove with some bric-a-brac from his career which also includes a video of an interview the gallery has done with him. In this he is disarmingly honest about his career and delivers funny stories with self-deprecating northern humour. And once you’re alerted to his sly humour it infects everything you see and you realise that a sly, dry northern sense of humour hovers over all these projects and colours every photo.
This is obvious in the conceits such as the whole Voyager 4 idea, and blatant in the children’s-rubber-bat vibe of the ghost rides. But once you’ve noted it, you realise there’s something humorous – a bit bleak, a bit nostalgic maybe but essentially droll – even about the urban destruction. The men and women standing in front of their old-fashioned shops or houses evoke thoughts of 1970s sitcoms like ‘Open All Hours’ or ‘The Last of The Summer Wine’, where even speaking with a northern accent is seen as comic.
For example there’s a classic Mitchell phot which is, on the face of it, another study in bleak and urban abandonment. It’s a shot of two frumpy middle-aged women standing in front of the utterly unglamorous blank brick wall which forms the backside of a cinema.
Two anonymous ladies, Tivoli Cinema, Acre Road from Sisson’s Lane, Leeds by Peter Mitchell (1976) © Peter Mitchell
So far, so urban wasteland. But in the caption underneath, Mitchell explains that he had the devil of a time trying to persuade these ladies to move. They’d bumped into each other and were having a nice natter and why should they move just so he could take his poncey photograph? My friend and I had a jolly couple of minutes ad libbing a sketch of two northern ladies who obstinately refuse to budge so some la-di-dah photographer can take a nice shot. ‘We like it here, don’t we Beryl?’ ‘Yes we meet up at this precise spot every Tuesday morning at 1o o’clock and no fancy photographer is going to budge us!’
Even the photos taken from Quarry Hill being demolished, admittedly many of the interiors of half-demolished flats genuinely are bleak and atmospheric – but the mood is lifted when you learn that Mitchell managed to line up the wrecking crew for a group portrait in front of their handiwork (Noel and his lads, 1978) but when he later sent them all copies of the photo, they complained that they came out too small.
Every photo has a caption and many of them give a droll and humorous spin on what ought to be bleak images of urban decay. Mitchell is more Alan Bennett than Ian Curtis.
Interview
Thoughts
In the interview Mitchell, in self-deprecating mode, happily concedes that his photos are, in one sense, all the same – they’re all done with the same classic, square, face-on approach to each building or object, eschewing fancy angles or perspectives, flashy treatment or distortion of the images or blurring – just straightforward, straight-on colour photos such as you or I might take.
And yet what an eye! Image after image after image is full of juice and meaning. There’s an extraordinary number of ‘hits’, almost all of the photos ‘work’, and you’d be happy to own loads of them.
‘Memento Mori’, ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ – his subject is the transience of human life but of a particular type – the lives of small people, of little people, of the ordinary people who run local stores and the chippy down the road. There’s no middle class, bourgeois or comfortably-off people in any of the pictures.
Mitchell’s photos come charged with a double nostalgia: first for a bygone era, a pie and a pint and Morecambe and Wise on the telly. And then the poignancy triggered by so much destruction and demolition, so many homes with all their experiences and memories turned to dust. Was it really necessary to tear so much down? And has what was put in its place really turned out to be an improvement?
The Kitson House telephone, Quarry Hill Flats by Peter Mitchell (1978) © Peter Mitchell
Promo video
Related links
- Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever continues at the Photographers’ Gallery until 15 June 2025
- Peter Mitchell’s website
- Guardian article
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