Image © Peter Mitchell/Camera Press
I found Leeds-based Peter Mitchell’s image of London in the 1970s while going through the archives at Camera Press. I was so struck by it that I started researching Mitchell and I’d love to see more of his work.
Mitchell’s work was shown in Tate Britain’s 2007 show How We Are: Photographing Britain, and the accompanying book describes him as ‘one of the few documentarists working with colour in the 1970s.’ How We Are continues:
Born in Salford, Mitchell studied graphic design at Hornsea College of Art, London, and has lived and worked in Leeds since 1972. Exhibitions include An Impression of the Yorkshire City of Leeds, Leeds City Art Gallery (1975); We are All Heroes of Today, Serpentine Art Gallery, London (1977); A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, Impressions Gallery, York (1979); and We Build It Here, Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate (1999).
Further, in 2007, according to How We Are, Mitchell was working on LS7 4DX Leeds Annals of a Life Threatening Postcode, a ‘meditation on the wake of the twentieth century and the destiny of cities.’ I don’t know how far Mitchell’s progressed with this work, but it sounds ambitious and interesting.
In a 2008 interview with the Yorkshire Post, Mitchell says: ‘I’m not political, I’m an agitator. I keep up with politics in the Everyman sense, I’m working-class Labour. There’s a lyric in a Dylan song – ‘always on the wrong side of whatever side there was’. That’s me.’
Image © Peter Mitchell/Camera Press
There’s also a 2008 Guardian article on Mitchell’s co-exhibition at the PSL Gallery, Leeds (2008), alongside Eric Jaquier: ‘Mitchell’s own contribution to social documentary photography began in the 1970s,’ the article goes, ‘when, [Mitchell says], Leeds was an “almost complete” Victorian city. “I’ve been bumbling around with a camera ever since,” he says. “It’s only recently that I’ve been getting critical acclaim.”’
There’s also an American Suburb X article on him by David Mellor, Professor of History of Art at the University of Sussex.
Mellor writes that Mitchell’s series A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, exhibited in 1979 at the Impressions Gallery, York, aimed to ‘de-familiarise the conventions of photographic urban topography’ by contrasting industrially depressed Leeds with the striking new technological images of space exploration people were then seeing on television.
Original catalogue for the 1979 exhibition A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, Impressions Gallery, York.
Belinda May at the London College of Communication’s Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) kindly directed me to PARC’s Flickr page. PARC owns an image from Mitchell’s Viking exhibition:
Image © PARC
Mellor continues: ‘NASA’s 1976 Viking Landers were a triumph of robotics, of remote sensing and imaging- that very culture of digitized information which was to supplant the manual world of industrial era Leeds- on an unknown planetary surface.’ Mellor goes on to say that: ‘in his documentation of collapsing states of technology in a decaying industrial environment, Mitchell, at the end of the 70’s, presaged cyber-punk commonplaces of the 80’s, by his antinomian interleaving of the sites of Mars with places in Leeds. The exhibition was laid out, in York, in 1980, with spatial interruptions of Leeds’ social and physical fabric by NASA photographs of specific locations on Mars, like Chryse Planitia in the Utopia Planitia zone, the basin where the first Viking Lander touched down in 1976.’
Mitchell’s ‘surveyer-like gaze’, evident in the Voyager photos, is very much evident in the earlier photograph of Piccadilly [top of page]. There is a vista-like sweep to the photo that hints at mechanised systems and suggests Mitchell, a trained graphic designer, had other influences. Interestingly, Mellor reveals what these influences were at the rough time the two photos featured on this page were taken:
‘Mitchell’s cartographic imagination of cities,’ writes Mellor, ‘was formed during his time at The Ministry of Housing in Whitehall – in a drawing office – as a draughtsman, straight from school, in 1959, and later for Colin Buchanan and Partners. In this latter job he devised city plans which registered preferred human traffic routes - kinds of bureaucratized pyscho-geographic drift - called ‘desire lines’ on the road to what Buchanan called ‘full motorization’. The dust jacket design for Ian Sinclair’s London Orbital used Mitchell’s ‘Desire Line diagram’ (Colin Buchanan Traffic in Towns 1963, p. 58.) for Newbury. This rationalized imaging of mechanized flows as ‘desire lines’ suggests a parallel, but equally technologized form of representation as Mitchell’s [Voyager] series with its gridded absurdities and gratuitous locations.
‘Behind so much of art and photography of this moment was the positivist belief in the power of the scientific or technical format; such that Euan Duff, too, wished to assemble HWA through linear bandings, conceptualized by him as a ‘list of different arrows on a flow chart which I wanted to relate together … the whole thing had a logical systematicity” (Euan Duff in conversation with Mellor, 25th. July 2005.) Yet, as with Mitchell, this systematicity might be a congruent frame for a melancholy view of an instrumentalized, brutal world.’
After reading this, I remembered I’d come across some of Mitchell’s photographs in January this year at the archives of the National Media Museum, Bradford. Here are three of them:
All Images © Peter Mitchell
I then stumbled across some more images by Peter at Camera Press:
‘Tourists in London’ / Image © Peter Mitchell/Camera Press
‘Tourists in London’ / Image © Peter Mitchell/Camera Press
Posted 8 months ago with NotesTags: influences
