R.Hill’s apartments in Leeds were one day the largest social housing complex in the United Kingdom. Blessed Houses for 3000 people. It was designed in the thirties of the twentieth century, and it was designed as Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna and no Cité de la Muette in Paris. However, just 40 years later, the buildings were collapsing and abandoned largely. For five years in the 1970s, Peter Mitchell documented his demolition, from shattered windows, shattered apartments to their abandoned treasures and solitary shoes. Finally, when all the remaining standing was a single arc, he tried to photograph the wreckage that stands in front of him, but he could not enter the bow.
“We have a crane.” Mitchell said. “.
Mitchell laughs gently on the memory. Now 82, he is one of the most important early photographers in the twentieth century and social historians. It was called “Naqi how we were, chasing a hidden world.” However, he insists that it is just pictures of “things that take my attention. Sometimes, I see something and think,” I will return when you do not rain. Then I go back and I fell. “
We are talking before his new exhibition in London, nothing that lasts forever, which he believes will be his last, but we meet in a café with a decorated eloquence from the Leeds Art Gallery, which hosted the exhibition last year and showed its photos for the first time in 1975, whenever the art exhibition was in the city . Remember that the new coordinator Sheila Ross was not very admired by silk screen prints. “But she said after that,” I love your photos. “
Mitchell’s work exudes warmth and sympathy. Although he is known for the title of what he calls “death buildings”, some of his strongest images pick up people in the workplace and the dignity of their work. From the early seventies of the last century to 2010, the opposition showman Francis Javan was photographed alongside the gradual ride of the train on the train, which was smart/terrified of school students (including me) in Woodhaus Moore, then the pottery fields – before he went away. Both of them suddenly.
“He built it himself and was proud of him,” Mitchell recalls. “I believe in the end that the authorities considered them unsafe.” After the death of Javan, his family came to see Mitchell’s pictures and the giant ghost train generation in a cellar. “Which will be a great shock to anyone who goes there.”
Mitchell has always been fascinated by “glory of debris.” He was born in Eklis, near Manchester, was transferred to Clevord in London during World War II and remembered the pride in playing in the raid shelters and bombed buildings. In adolescence, she holds about the childhood things that most people leave – games, Airfix groups, and notes – and still has it to this day.
After leaving the school sixteen years old, he trained as a civil service painter, but he felt not fulfilling, so he joined eight years later to study the printing and graphic design at the Hornecy College of Art, where an Italian photographer inspired him to take a camera. “But I always believed, it could be a strong image like the painting,” he says.
Mitchell came to Leeds in 1972 to visit a friend, fell in love with Victorian architecture and never left, as he rented a place in Shapelet Town for 2.50 pounds per week and working as a truck driver while establishing. On his first day in the city, he visited the Beckett Street cemetery. “There was a lot of grave evidence for children who died of cholera,” he says. “I have done a lot of photography on that first day.”
He had a great impact on his pioneering exhibition in 1979, a new refute of the SPACE VIKING 4 mission – the first colorful exhibition by a British photographer at a British exhibition, that is, impressions in York. It was inspired by Viking’s investigations in 1976 to Mars, although Mitchell gave her a development, imagining that a strange craft had landed on the ground, in Leeds to be accurate, and began taking pictures.
“I knew a student who wrote to NASA asking about the characteristics you need to become an astronaut and receive a response,” explains. “So I wrote to NASA myself and received a message of humor. Dear Mr. Mitchell. We understand that you want to go to Mars. If you give us a few million, we can get you there. But if you just want a picture, we can send you one for nothing.”
They sent him more than one, in fact, Mitchell expanded these Merikha landscapes and showed it along with his own pictures of the decomposing Leeds, decorated with the coordinates of the map as if it were from a space mission. “A public school in the countryside has borrowed the group for a project on the solar system,” smiling. “They said, this is not astronomy at all. They seem to have taken with the coastal Kodak Codak camera.”
In fact, they were taken with the same hasselblad camera in the fifties (“The Blad”) that Mitchell carried with him for more than half a century. Every Blad image, apparently, has a story.
Take its amazing shot to a motorcycle gang in front of a motorcycle mural decorating the side of the Leeds home. “It has just happened,” he says. “Two Taman girls were against the old Porsche, a little wreck. One person was sitting on his bike and there was another blow behind him threatening someone. I didn’t want to boycott, so I said,“ I will only take a picture. ”Later, I was offered to Porsche 300 £ The car, which was about the tracks – as they were before. “
Blad has also documented contracts of social change, including the impact of cultural pluralism on the city. A picture of the Caribbean Voice Voice System was taken during the annual carnival, in the days when the DJ was accumulating in the front gardens and operating the power cables from each window overlooking the outside. “On the day before the carnival, we will always get a message,” Mitchell smiled. He said, “Do not give them any electricity – because it is dangerous.”
Another snapshot, called how many aunt? , Picking the colored chaos at an Asian wedding that happened in the background near his home. “I went to take out the garbage,” Mitchell says, and I saw cars rising. The Sikhs chapter was trying to take a picture but could not get everyone, and all women were drifting inside. I ran my steps, grabbed the camera from the kitchen, and told them, “I’ll take it!”
Sometimes, he shot the interiors, such as Concorde background, on the bedroom wall. He took a look at him through a window and asked to politely photograph it. “It is a truly bad snapshot, not a little clear,” he says. “But it became really popular. A few years ago, he gave me a nice photographer a large piece of the same background in exchange for a large version of my image. I saw it somewhere, went inside and his ability to award.”
Throughout all of this, he remained in Chapestown, in the same house. Last year, it was reinforced four times, but recently the silver Audi was withdrawn and a man came out and expressed interest in buying the place. “Then he went, did you still live here?
At the same time, the city around it changes. Mitchell feels dismay when Victoriana is replaced by some boring large plastic, but he still feels childish excitement from the discovery of a hidden jewel, such as Al -Jazzar store, which dates back to a century that he recently encountered with a “beautiful green communication”.
Although he does not walk in the streets with Blad as much as he used to, he still loves to wrap and “a small tattoo of photography” is when he can. “Blad is very heavy for me to use it now,” he says. “But someone loved me for me a replica of wool. When I go to the exhibition, I will carry it.”