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Peter Mitchell (photographer)
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Books
Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody
Peter Mitchell (born 1943) is a British documentary photographer, known for documenting Leeds and the surrounding area for more than 40 years. Mitchell's photographs have been published in three monographs of his own. His work was exhibited at Impressions Gallery in 1979, and nearly thirty years later was included in major survey exhibitions throughout the UK including at Tate Britain and Media Space in London, and National Media Museum in Bradford. Mitchell's work is held in the permanent collections of the Royal Photographic Society and Leeds Art Gallery.
In 1979 Impressions Gallery showed his work A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, which considered what Leeds would look like to aliens arriving from Mars. Martin Parr described this show as groundbreaking.
His images of Quarry Hill flats were published as Memento Mori in 1990. His ongoing documentation of Leeds became the critically well received monographStrangely Familiar. Colin Pantall described this work as "a classic". He told the BBC that it is a "gritty kind of sentimentality". His follow-up, Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody (2015), shows inanimate objects looked over by scarecrows. Reviewer Karen Jenkins called it a "story of steadfastness and continuity".
In 2007 Mitchell's work was included in How We Are: Photographing Britain a photography exhibition held at Tate Britain.
Publications
Momento Mori. Skipton, Dalesman, 1990. ISBN 9781870071482.
Some Thing means Everything to Somebody. Bristol: RRB, 2015.
Scarecrows. Bristol: RRB, 2015. "A collection of 12 of the Scarecrows from Some Thing means Everything to Somebody, plus a few new suspects, in a perforated postcard book."
A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission Bristol: RRB, 2017.
Exhibitions
A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, Impressions Gallery, York, UK, 1979. The exhibition considered what Leeds would look like to aliens arriving from Mars.
Project Space Leeds (PSL), Leeds, UK, 2008. With Mitchell and Eric Jacquier. The exhibition showed how Leeds has changed since the 1960s.
Drawn By Light: The Royal Photographic Society Collection, National Media Museum, Bradford, UK; Media Space, Science Museum, London. Photographs by Mitchell, Roger Fenton, William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Don McCullin, Terry O’Neill, Martin Parr and others.
No Such Thing As Society: Photography in Britain 1967-1987, toured 2008–2010. Works from the collections of the British Council and Arts Council England, Hayward Gallery, London; Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth; Tullie House, Carlisle; Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds; National Museum, Cardiff; Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne; The Exchange, Penzance; Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland; and Arbetets Museum, Norrkoping, Sweden.
