Good morning, Leeds
Peter Mitchell has quietly spent half a century capturing soon to be lost corners of his adopted home. Sarah Freeman meets a photographer the city should be shouting about. Main picture
by Simon Hulme.
His knowledge of the city was helped by working as a delivery driver and while photography has always been his first love, he has struggled to make it pay. Mitchell spent much of his working life as a graphic designer, creating posters for museums and galleries, but then four years ago his work suddenly began to garner international attention.
“I’d unexpectedly acquired an agent,” he says, referring to Bristol-based Rudi Thoemmes. “He’s a dealer in photographic and antiquarian books and during one stock take he realised my book Strangely Familiar had sold rather well, or at least well by photographic standards.
“He asked around and while I think most people had never heard of me, the photographer Martin Parr, who also lives in Bristol, encouraged him to represent me and well, the rest of history.”
Ever since, Thoemmes has been on something of a mission to tell the world about Mitchell and albeit belatedly, word does seem to be spreading. A couple of years ago his work was showcased at the Arles photography festival, the author Geoff Dyer wrote a warm profile of Mitchell in the New York Times and in 2016 the Impressions Gallery in Bradford hosted the first major solo exhibition of his work. He also has more than 19,000 followers on Instagram, not that he has ever looked at the site.
“Rudi takes care of that,” says Mitchell, who has remained resolutely analogue. He doesn’t own a laptop, can only be contacted via landline and he has refused to swap his heavy Hasselblad camera for a lighter, slimline equivalent. “I am not one for change. I do take a couple more shots than I used to because my eyesight isn’t what it was, although it’s better than Dominic Cummings. Everything else though is much as it was.
“Take my Honda Civic – it is completely ruined and so old they don’t even make parts for it anymore. The sensible thing would be to partexchange it for a cost efficient Fiat, but that would seem like a betrayal, so I will keep driving it despite the terrible clanging.”
While trawling car showrooms is not on Mitchell’s to-do list, he does have other projects on the horizon. He wants to create two masterworks, one dedicated to a fairground owner who Mitchell photographed intermittently next to his graduallyrusting ghost train and the other, a tribute to the street in the north Leeds suburb where he lives.
There should be a third project – a retrospective of his work in his home city. It was back in 1975 that Leeds City Art Gallery displayed a few of Mitchell’s photographs, but since then his work has been conspicuous only by its absence.
“I have managed in obscurity pretty well,” he laughs. “I don’t need attention, although it was very nice to get an honorary degree from Leeds Arts University the other year. In fact, what I am saying? I would love an exhibition in Leeds, one where the mayor could come and present me with a great big medal.
“Although if I did allow myself to be embraced by the establishment I would probably have no option but to stop taking photographs and become a sad alcoholic shouting nonsense on street corners.”
Early Sunday Morning is out now priced £50. Prints from the book are also available to buy via the website at rrbphotobooks.com