Spring season at the Photographers Gallery Soho starts today
The Spring season at the Photographers Gallery kicks off today, with a showcase of one of the 20th century’s most important early colour photographers and social historians.
Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever will run at the Soho Gallery until June 15.
Described as “a narrator of who we were, a chaser of a disappearing world”, by Val Williams, Mr Mitchell’s work reveals his love of the people and changing face of Leeds for more than 40 years.
Born in Eccles, near Manchester in 1943, Mr Mitchell was relocated to Catford, Lewisham, during the Second World War.
He studied at Hornsey College of Art in Crouch End, before moving north to look for work.
In 1972 he visited Leeds, fell in love, and never left.
Now 82, Mr Mitchell is known for his shots of degrading buildings and workers proud in their craft snapped throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
In the 1970s, he photographed the five year demolition of the Quarry Hills Estate – once the largest social housing complex in the UK.
He said: “I know there was no point in keeping Quarry Hill flats. But what it stood for might have been worth keeping”
He then captured the life and trade of a fairground showman alongside his ghost train ride from the 1970s to the 2010s, as well as tracking the impact of multiculturalism on the city.
A photograph of a Caribbean sound system, Sir Yank’s Heavy Disco, shows piles of loudspeakers in the front garden of a home in Harehills Avenue, with power cables running out the windows.
In 1979, Mr Mitchell’s exhibition, A New Refutation of the Space Viking 4 Mission, became the first colour exhibition by a British photographer in a British gallery.
The show, much of which will form part of Nothing Lasts Forever, imagines England as seen through the eyes of an alien from Mars, demolished flats, shopkeepers and their shops, and boarded-up and disused buildings, as well as his portraits of scarecrows.
Calling himself ‘a man of the pavement’, Mitchell continues to regularly walk the streets of Leeds to photograph his beloved hometown today.
Nothing Lasts Forever marks a return to The Photographers’ Gallery for Mr Mitchell, following his first exhibition in 1984.
Also opening today as part of the Spring season, the gallery welcomes the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2025.
Work by the shortlisted artists, Cristina De Middel, Rahim Fortune, Lindokuhle Sobekwa and Tarrah Krajnak, will be shown as part of an exhibition until June 15.
Shortlisted projects include documentary photography, constructed images, self-portraiture, performance and family archives bringing together themes of migration, community and belonging.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize identifies and rewards photographers for projects that have made a significant contribution to photography over the past year.
Over its 28-year history, the Prize has become renowned as one of the most important international awards for photographers.
The winner of the £30,000 Prize will be announced at an award ceremony at The Photographers’ Gallery on May 15, with the other finalists each receiving £5,000.
Pictured top: Peter Mitchell, Ready mixed Concrete Ltd, Elland Road, Leeds, 1977 (Picture: Peter Mitchell)