Leeds is another planet in this exhibition from veteran British photographer Peter Mitchell, a name nowhere near as well-known as contemporaries like Don McCullin or Martin Parr – but a truly worthwhile discovery if you’ve never heard of him. A Londoner who moved to Leeds in 1972 and never left, Mitchell’s photos in this small but transporting exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery take us on a tour of the backstreets and alleys of his adopted city, mainly during the 1970s, giving us proud shopkeepers and aproned artisans standing in front of crumbling premises, many of which look more Victorian or Edwardian than late-twentieth-century.
Mitchell’s work – most of it in colour – has an unfussy, curious documentary appeal, all muted tones and small details like the lettering of shopfronts taking on a nostalgia four decades later. But there’s also playfulness. Someone once told Mitchell – now in his eighties – that his photos felt like they’d been taken by an alien visiting Earth. He turned that comment into a gag and interspersed actual NASA pictures of the surface of Mars among photos of timewarp shopfronts and ageing houses. He extends the joke by framing many of his works with faux-scientific ruled edges, turning all of Leeds into a lab rat. The captions, with their more modern references, including a reference to digital photos, were clearly written much later. They add another sense of time passing to the show.
He gives us utopia being shattered in front of our eyes
A high point is Mitchell’s photos of the immense 1930s-built Quarry Hill flats, mid-demolition in the 1970s. He gives us utopia being shattered in front of our eyes, in huge prints. You can’t help but wonder what’s gone wrong in such a short space of time. Again, it’s not all gloom and doom: one photo shows the big colourful flags that Mitchell and his wife placed on top of one of Quarry Hill’s gutted blocks, spelling out ‘GOODBYE WORLD’ in Morse code.
It’s odd to imagine now, but when Mitchell was taking these photos, colour photography was barely respected. Like his American contemporary William Eggleston, Mitchell was breaking new ground. Of course, there’s now a retro appeal to Mitchell’s vision of a lost age – a chance to transport yourself to a long gone time and place – but to his contemporaries, this was strange and radical work, strikingly modern and engaging.
