The Brooklyn Rail

The English North is a locale that looms large in the British imagination. Once the birthplace of industrialism and the economic engine that propelled the expansion of the Empire, it has since become a shorthand for the country’s deep-seated problems as a result of slow but seemingly inexorable postindustrial slump. Perhaps for this reason, the North has always been a favorite subject of photographers—onlookers by trade—who wouldn’t mind the long trek from London so long as something different, at once more uncouth and more authentic, revealed itself to their camera. As different as they are, Chris Killip’s black-and-white snapshots of lumpen marginality in In Flagrante (1988) and Martin Parr’s equally iconic images of brass working-class vitality in Last Resort (1986) are really two sides of this same coin.

At first glance, the work of Peter Mitchell (b. 1943) might also appear to fall into this hallowed, if slightly voyeuristic, tradition. The photos that make up Nothing Lasts Forever, an outstanding retrospective of Mitchell’s work currently on view at the Photographers’ Gallery, show all the familiar facets of dereliction: crumbling housing estates, washed-up neighborhood family businesses, eerie barely standing scarecrows. All of these are captured in vibrant color and an unassuming square format.

Mitchell grew up in South East London and studied as a cartographic draughtsman before being swept up by the counterculture in the 1960s. He took the photos that make up this exhibition mostly during the 1970s and 1980s in Leeds, where he had originally taken work as a truck driver, a day job which afforded him ample opportunity for random wanderings through the Northern cityscape. Still, even if the photos betray a taste for the eccentric and the weird, sometimes displaying a form of gallows humor, they are anything but a safari tour of postindustrial misery. As much as they zoom in on the ravages left by the disappearance of industry—a void that in those years was only to be made worse by Thatcher’s neoliberal reforms and crackdown on mining communities—I am not even sure they can be called “social documents” in the strictest sense of the term.

A niche at the far back of the exhibition’s single large room features photographs of Quarry Hill Flats, a large social housing estate which was already in the process of being demolished by the time Mitchell started photographing it. As a nearby caption states, Quarry Hill first opened in 1938 and was considered the largest social housing complex in Britain, at its peak hosting as many as three thousand people. But in the mid-1970s it stood as a crumbling memorial to that architectural “militant modernism” which saw béton brut as the surest way to achieve socialist utopia, but which, as Owen Hatherley writes in a namesake essay from 2009, quickly came to exemplify urban decay and economic stagnation.

Haunting as they are, these images of eviscerated skeletons of buildings, vacant lots, heaps of rubble, and achingly empty rooms bathed in orange light are not monuments to any utopian vision of Britain as an “industrial island machine”—a phrase Hatherley borrows from Vorticist (and fascist!) writer Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), but which nevertheless captures quite well the vibe of so much Brutalist council housing. Nor are they ghosts of “lost futures,” as it was put by Mark Fisher, a cultural critic who wrote quite a bit about the shattered promises of British mid-century social democracy. On the contrary, as the title of the photobook in which the photos were first collected, Memento Mori (1990), suggests, Mitchell’s photographs capture that very modern type of melancholia best discussed by Walter Benjamin: the sense of foreboding that comes from knowing that capitalism and its ethos of creative destruction will one day turn everything that now appears solid into rubble.

Similarly, the two series that face each other in the show’s main space both—in addition to their shared approach of tongue-in-cheek defamiliarization—turn out to be meditations on the passage of time and the transience of all things. A group of snapshots portray Francis Gavan and his “ghost train,” capturing the man proudly posing beside the fantasy ride he built from pieces he found at the scrap heap. These images play openly with death as a motif: a skull sitting atop the ghost train signals that these are “travelling images of mortality.” However, what makes them truly poignant is that they portray Gavan at different stages of his life—first as a bulky, jolly man; then as a bone-tired, melancholic senior; and finally, out of the frame altogether. As Mitchell remarks wryly, “Everything dies in the end—even ghost trains.”

The same could be said of “A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission.” Encased by fake coordinates, these photographs make up the lion’s share of the exhibition and juxtapose views of Mars with snapshots of (primarily) Leeds that are by turns picturesque, by turns depressing. They imagine the city as an alien might experience it: a strange, unfamiliar place. However, the captions (whose general tone ranges from mordant to openly mocking and stand-offish) once again reveal these images to be musings on the theme of death and impermanence. The snapshot of a burned-down synagogue (no foul play involved as far we know) is accompanied by the caption, “They say Dresden was quite a sight too.” Likewise, the shot of a funeral parlor is paired with, “Tasteful lettering to match a tasteful business.” Other images on view portray a graveyard, a comically off-mark nineteenth-century sculpture of a dinosaur abandoned in the undergrowth, and scores of small businesses facing or fighting against closure.

The overall effect is close to that of a room full of Dutch Vanitas—not a psycho-geographical investigation of how vernacular architecture reflects a certain mentality and way of living, but still lifes reminding the viewer of the inevitability of death. Like skulls in the classical tradition of Vanitas, the scarecrows in the exhibition foyer act as symbols of the fragility and precarity of all human existence. Even so, the mood is anything but grave or tragic. Much like the danses macabres of the Middle Ages, Mitchell’s pictures act as an exorcism or attempt to cope, a last gasp of vitality before the inevitable.