Early Sunday Morning – Peter Mitchell

Early Sunday Morning consists of over 90 largely unpublished images, each selected from a cache of five hundred negatives that have remained unseen for over 30 years.

Early Sunday Morning, edited and sequenced by John Myers, shows a different Leeds city from Mitchell’s early publications. It is neither the bleak 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…

The book reveals the layers of the city’s history, exposed by the changing urban landscape that embodied the 1970s and 1980s. Century-old terraces and cobbled streets are lined with concrete flats, with the freshly cleared land on either side are presented with Mitchell’s typical graphic frame.

“It is as if Peter Mitchell has taken the atmosphere and mood of Edward Hopper’s famous painting and established it as a documentary fact in the north of England at a time when collapse can lead to further desolation or possible renewal. So these beautiful images are steeped in history: social, economic and photographic”. – Geoff Dyer