PETER MITCHELL

Born in Manchester in 1943, Peter left school at 16 and moved to London where he trained as a cartographic draughtsman and worked for the civil service in Whitehall. In the middle of the 1960s, at the age of 24, he decided to go to art school, gaining a place at Hornsey College of Art studying typography and graphic design. In 1972 he visited friends in Leeds, liked it, rented a large but run down house for £2.45 a week, and has never left.

Travelling with his medium format Hasselblad and a stepladder so that he could shoot from a higher angle and avoid distorting perspective, his carefully framed pictures are the antithesis of the street photographers’ hastily grabbed ‘decisive moments’. They have a quiet formality about them with the subjects being willing participants in the recording process. He was also unique in the British non-commercial photography scene in that he worked in colour and is now viewed as a pioneer in his field.

Big news in 1975 was NASA’S Viking mission to Mars when they successfully landed two craft on the surface and transmitted back the first colour images of the Red Planet. Peter was intrigued, and for his first solo exhibition and subsequent book imagined that his photographs of Leeds had been captured by a Viking Lander on a return mission to Earth. Putting his cartography skills to use he created a grid reference framing device for the photographs and also incorporated some of the Mars images into the exhibition.

Peter is currently sifting through 50-years’ worth of negatives in anticipation of a retrospective exhibition of his work towards the end of next year.