Peter Mitchell: Early Sunday Morning
RRB Photobooks is delighted to present Peter Mitchell’s Early Sunday Morning. The book is made up of over 90 largely unpublished images, each one selected from a cache of five hundred negatives which have sat unseen for over 30 years.
Early Sunday Morning, edited and sequenced by John Myers, shows a different Leeds to Mitchell’s earlier publications. It is neither the somber look at destruction seen in Memento Mori, nor the detached view of ‘the man from mars’ of A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, but a more intimate document of Mitchell’s own Leeds.
The book reveals the layers of the city’s history, exposed by the changes to the urban landscape that epitomized the 1970s and 80s.
Hundred-year-old terraces and cobbled streets sit flanked by concrete flats, with newly cleared ground to either side are presented with Mitchell’s typical graphic framing.
“It is as if Peter Mitchell has taken the atmosphere and mood of Edward Hopper’s famous painting and established it as a matter of documentary fact in the north of England at a moment when collapse can lead to further desolation or possible renewal. So these beautiful pictures are drily drenched in history – social, economic and photographic.” – Geoff Dyer
Early Sunday Morning is available in an edition of 1500, including 100 copies with signed and limited pigment print.
About the Author
Peter Mitchell, born in 1943, has been quietly building a career for 40 years. Living and working in Leeds for much of his life, Mitchell treats his surrounding with a unique sense of care that is evident in his work.
An essential part of the color documentary scene in the 1970s and ‘80s, Mitchell’s landmark show A New Refutation of the Space Viking 4 Mission at Impressions Gallery in 1979 has had an immeasurable impact on contemporary photographic culture. Mitchell has never been a prolific publisher of work; the 1990’s Memento Mori examined the dramatic impact of the Quarry Hill redevelopment project in Leeds and his long-overdue monograph, Strangely Familiar, published in 2013, features formal portraits of Leed’s people and their places of work. Mitchell’s latest work, Some Thing means Everything to Somebody, is an eccentric autobiography told through inanimate objects silently observed by scarecrows. By pairing an intensely personal collection with the symbolic ‘Everyman’, Mitchell has produced something that is not only autobiographical but the representation of what a lifetime can mean.
