Peter Mitchell & Martin Parr: In Conversation
U
As part of a major exhibition of his work at Leeds Art Gallery this summer, acclaimed photographer Peter Mitchell will join us at the Picture House for a special in-conversation event, alongside renowned photographer Martin Parr. The pair will look back on Peter’s remarkable career and his unique role in documenting the changing landscape of Leeds over many decades.
Regarded as one of the most important early colour photographers of the 20th century, Mitchell’s retrospective Nothing Lasts Forever marks nearly half a century since the photographer’s first exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery in 1975, and is being accompanied by a new publication.
Thanks to Leeds Art Gallery and RRB Photobooks for making this special event possible.
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Main image credit: detail from Woodhouse Moor, Leeds, 1986 Peter Mitchell © the artist.
Peter Mitchell
Born in Manchester in 1943, Peter Mitchell left school at 16 and trained as a cartographic draughtsman working for the civil service, until aged 24, he went to Hornsey College of Art in London. After a visit to Leeds, he never returned to London and has lived in the same house in Chapeltown for more than 40 years. During his working life he has had many jobs – truck driving to silkscreen and printmaking, hand-lettering and poster designer and stock control clerk of a perfume counter – all the time taking photographs. Mitchell’s exhibition A New Refutation of the Space Viking 4 Mission at Impressions Gallery in 1979 established his career and was the first colour exhibition, at a British photographic gallery, by a British photographer. However, it wasn’t until the publication of his book Strangely Familiar (2013) that the trajectory of his career accelerated at the age of 70. Two further books have followed — Memento Mori, Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody and A New Refutation of the Space Viking 4 Mission. His latest book, Nothing Lasts Forever was released earlier this year to accompany a new exhibition of the same name, opening at Leeds Art Gallery in May 2024.
His work has been included in exhibitions at Tate Britain, and Media Space in London, and National Media Museum in Bradford. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Royal Photographic Society and Leeds Art Gallery amongst others.
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Martin Parr
Martin Parr is one of the best-known documentary photographers of his generation. With over 100 books of his own published, and another 30 edited by Parr, his photographic legacy is already established.
Parr also acts as a curator and editor. He has curated two photography festivals, Arles in 2004 and Brighton Biennial in 2010. More recently Parr curated the Barbican exhibition, Strange and Familiar. Parr has been a member of the Magnum agency since 1994 and was President from 2013 - 2017. In 2013 Parr was appointed the visiting professor of photography at the University of Ulster.
Parr’s work has been collected by many of the leading museums, from the Tate, the Pompidou and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Martin Parr established the Martin Parr Foundation in 2017.
In 2019 the National Portrait Gallery in London held a major exhibition of Parr’s work titled Only Human.