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Dear Nasa, please send me to Mars! The photographer who showed Britain – and space

Dear Nasa, please send me to Mars! The photographer who showed Britain – and space

The Guardian25-02-2025
The Quarry Hill flats in Leeds were once the largest social housing complex in the UK. A utopian vision of homes for 3,000 people. Built in the 1930s, they were modelled on the Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna and La Cité de la Muette in Paris. However, after just 40 years, the buildings were crumbling and largely deserted. Over the course of five years in the 1970s, Peter Mitchell documented their demolition, from smashed windows and wrecked apartments to abandoned wardrobes and solitary shoes. Finally, when all that was left standing was a lone arch, he tried to photograph the wrecking crew standing in front of it, but couldn't get the arch in.
'So,' Mitchell remembers, 'the foreman said, 'We do have a crane.' I can't stand heights but they lowered the crane down so I could stand on it, then lifted me up to quickly get the shot. I was swaying about a bit and all but one of them came out blurred – but I got the picture.'
Mitchell laughs gently at the memory. Now 82, he is one of the 20th century's most important early colour photographers and social historians. He has been called 'a narrator of how we were, a chaser of a disappearing world'. Yet he insists he just photographs 'things that take my eye. Sometimes, I'd see something and think, 'I'll come back when it's not raining.' Then I'd go back and it had been knocked down.'
We're talking ahead of his new London exhibition Nothing Lasts Forever, which he thinks will be his last, but we meet in the ornate tiled cafe of Leeds Art Gallery, which hosted the exhibition last year and first showed his photos in 1975, when it was the City Art Gallery. He remembers that the new curator Sheila Ross wasn't hugely impressed by his silkscreen prints. 'But then she said, 'I like your photos.''
Mitchell's work exudes warmth and empathy. Although he's known for shots of what he calls 'dying buildings', some of his most powerful images capture people in the workplace and the dignity of their labour. From the early 1970s to the 2010s, he photographed fairground showman Francis Gavan alongside his gradually more weatherbeaten ghost train ride, which thrilled/terrified generations of schoolchildren (including myself) on Woodhouse Moor, then Pottery Fields – before suddenly both were gone.
'He built it himself and was proud of it,' Mitchell remembers. 'I think eventually the authorities deemed it unsafe.' After Gavan died, his family came to see Mitchell's photos, and the ghost train's giant skull is now in his cellar. 'Which would be quite a shock for anyone going down there.'
Mitchell has always been fascinated by 'the glory of the wreckage'. Born in Eccles, near Manchester, he was relocated to Catford in London during the second world war and fondly remembers playing in air-raid shelters and bombed-out buildings. In his teens he held on to childhood things most people leave behind – toys, Airfix model kits, diaries – and he still has them to this day.
After leaving school at 16, he trained as a cartographic draughtsman for the civil service but felt unfulfilled, so eight years later enrolled to study typography and graphic design at Hornsey College of Art, where a visiting Italian photographer inspired him to pick up a camera. 'But I had always believed,' he says, 'a photograph could be as powerful as a painting.'
Mitchell came to Leeds in 1972 to visit a friend, fell in love with the Victorian architecture and never left, renting a place in Chapeltown for £2.50 a week and working as a van driver while he became established. On his first day in the city he visited Beckett Street cemetery. 'There were lots of gravestones for babies who'd died from cholera,' he says. 'I did a lot of photography that first day.'
He made a major impact with his groundbreaking 1979 exhibition A New Refutation of the Space Viking 4 Mission – the first colour exhibition by a British photographer in a British gallery, namely Impressions in York. It was inspired by the 1976 Viking probes to Mars, although Mitchell gave it a twist, imagining that an alien craft had landed on Earth, in Leeds to be precise, and begun to take photos.
'I knew a student who'd written to Nasa asking what qualities you needed to become a spaceman and received a reply,' he explains. 'So I wrote to Nasa myself and received a humorous letter. 'Dear Mr Mitchell. We understand you want to go to Mars. If you give us a couple of million, we can get you up there. But if you just want a picture, we can send you one for nothing.''
They sent him more than one, in fact, and Mitchell enlarged these Martian landscapes and exhibited them alongside his own images of decaying Leeds, adorned with map coordinates as if from a space mission. 'A public school in the countryside borrowed the collection for a project on the solar system,' he grins. 'They said, 'These aren't astronomy at all. They look like they were taken with a Kodak seaside camera.''
In fact, they were taken with the same 1950s Hasselblad camera ('the Blad') that Mitchell has carried with him for over half a century. Every photo taken by the Blad, it seems, has a story.
Take his striking shot of a biker gang in front of a motorcycle mural that adorned the side of a Leeds house. 'I just happened by,' he says. 'Two girls were leaning against an old Porsche, a bit of a wreck really. One guy was sitting on his bike and another bloke behind him was threatening somebody. I didn't want to interrupt, so I said, 'I'll just take a picture.'' Later, Porsche offered him £300 to publish the photo in their magazine. 'I said they could have it for nothing as long as they sent me a copy. They did and alongside my picture was a bigger one of the very same car, roaring around the tracks – as it once had been.'
The Blad has also documented decades of social change, including the impact of multiculturalism on the city. A photograph of Caribbean sound system Sir Yank's Heavy Disco was taken during the annual carnival, in the days when DJs would pile loudspeakers in front gardens and run power cables out of every window looking out. 'The day before the carnival, we'd always get a letter,' grins Mitchell. 'It said, 'Do not give them any electricity – because it's dangerous.'' Sir Yank ('the boss of Yorkshire sounds') ran a nearby record shop selling Jamaican imports, so Mitchell photographed that as well.
Another shot, called How Many Aunties?, captures the colourful chaos at an Asian wedding that took place in the backstreets near his house. 'I went to put the rubbish out,' says Mitchell, 'and saw cars draw up. A Sikh chap was trying to take a photo but couldn't get everyone in and all the women were drifting back inside. I ran up my steps, grabbed the camera from the kitchen, and told them, 'I'll take it!''
Occasionally, he shot interiors, such as Concorde Wallpaper, snapped on a bedroom wall. He glimpsed it through a window and politely asked to photograph it. 'It's a bad shot really, a bit blurred,' he says. 'But it became really popular. A few years ago, a nice illustrator gave me a big piece of that same wallpaper in exchange for a large copy of my photo. She'd seen it somewhere, gone inside and prised it off.'
Throughout it all, he has remained in Chapeltown, in the same house. Last year it was burgled four times, but recently a silver Audi pulled up and a man got out and expressed an interest in buying the place. 'Then he went, 'Do you still live here? I used to jump off that wall when I was a kid.' He couldn't believe it had been the same person in the house all this time.'
Meanwhile the city changes around him. Mitchell is dismayed whenever Victoriana is replaced by some big bit of boring plastic, but he still gets a childlike thrill from discovering a hidden gem, such as the century-old butcher's shop he came across recently with 'beautiful green tiling'.
Although he doesn't walk the streets with the Blad as much as he used to, he still likes to get around and does 'little bits of photography' when he can. 'The Blad's almost too heavy for me to use now,' he says. 'But someone's knitted me a woollen replica. When I go to the exhibition, I'm going to carry that.'
Nothing Lasts Forever is at the Photographers' Gallery, London, 7 March to 15 June. A book of the same title is published by RRB Photobooks.
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The glee over the downfall of Salt Path is ugly and elitist
The glee over the downfall of Salt Path is ugly and elitist

The Herald Scotland

time13-07-2025

  • The Herald Scotland

The glee over the downfall of Salt Path is ugly and elitist

'Mitchell's travels across the line that separates fiction and non-fiction are his singular feat,' she wrote in a review. 'His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they're so much more exciting to read than the work of other non-fiction writers with ambition.' Much as I admire Malcolm, she was a bit of a minx: a contrarian that liked to bait her readers with provocative opinions. And much as I admire Mitchell, I think he crossed lines a journalist — even a 'creative' journalist — ought not to cross. But memoir is different. Memoir is the pursuit of a partial truth that lies beyond the strict laying out of facts. When charting a relationship, we can say: 'This happened, then this, and then this,' but the significance we attach to the chronology is entirely subjective. A memoirist may base their book on events as they remember them, but which ones they choose to emphasise and which they choose to downplay will alter the way the reader views the whole. In fiction the 'unreliable narrator' is a literary device; in memoir it's a given. We are all unreliable narrators of our own lives. No-one should ever pick up a memoir expecting a definitive account. At best, you are being served up one party's 'truth'; other brands will be available (though they may never be written). This is a preamble to talking about The Salt Path: a scandal which, according to some catastrophisers, threatens the entire genre. It is of course suboptimal that Raynor Winn stands accused of misrepresenting the circumstances in which she and her husband Moth lost their house — the catalyst for the walk at the centre of the book — and that doubt is being cast over the degenerative condition from which she says Moth suffers. For her part, she says the claims are "grotesquely unfair" and "highly misleading". But I'd argue the response to it — the sheer glee some people have taken in its annihilation — is both ugly and elitist. The implication appears to be not only that Raynor and Moth got their comeuppance, but that the kinds of people stupid enough to take comfort in their story also got what was coming to them. Read more Dani Garavelli: In the aftermath of the Observer exposé, which included allegations that Winn had defrauded her previous employer of £64,000, others have chosen to cast the book as a giant grift in the mould of Major Charles Ingram – the cheating Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? contestant, or Captain Tom's daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore, who appears to have helped herself to large chunks of the money raised in his name. I can see the attraction in that. We Brits love a financial scam well-executed. With only money at stake, we can pretend to be outraged while secretly admitting the chutzpah of all involved. But that degree of premeditation seems unlikely to me. Publishing is a precarious business; a best-seller is never guaranteed. It feels more plausible that Winn chose to write her book the way she wrote it because that's the version of herself she wanted to believe in. 'We tell ourselves stories in order to live,' Joan Didion famously said. The story Winn told herself may have been a whopper, which is a shame because — as moral arcs go — one which followed an author admitting, owning and atoning for her past misdemeanours would have been far more interesting. Instead, by charting her failure to budget, her theft of food, her refusal to pay campsite fees, Winn unwittingly unveils herself as a woman who thinks the world owes her a living. Some truths will out despite our best efforts. The book has been a huge success. (Image: Newsquest) Penguin must take responsibility for a lack of due diligence if the claims are true. Forget the erosion of funding: it's the publisher's job to ensure the authors they commission are who they say they are. On Amazon, there are one star reviews suggesting holes in the story. But it's also worth asking why the book industry, and indeed consumers, are so fixated on quests and spiritual journeys. It puts a pressure on memoir writers to shape their writing in a particular way. I remember mulling over this when I was reading Sally Huband's Sea Bean, a memoir on how beachcombing helped her cope with chronic illness. I should stress that I really liked this book, so what follows is not a criticism. But as someone who sometimes writes non-fiction memoir, I found myself constantly fretting: would the eponymous sea bean ever be found? My concern was not for the beachcomber Sally Huband, who had already gathered many other interesting things from the strandline, but for the author Sally Huband, for whom the failure to accomplish the mission within the publisher's time frame might prove a disaster. Read more Dani Garavelli: Huband's book is not like The Salt Path. There is a spiritual journey of sorts, but it's about coming to terms with the limitations of her life. That's an entirely legitimate enterprise, but even a coming-to-terms should not be de rigueur. Isn't failure as interesting as success? Can't we just celebrate the human experience in all its glorious messiness? If you're looking for truth, that's where it's more likely to be found. Not everyone is hung up on the truth. You'll see that if you check the Amazon reviews for James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, a memoir about addiction, later revealed to contain significant falsehoods. 'It doesn't matter to me that some ... of this book is fabricated,' one reader says. 'Some books stay with you.' 'I'm not particularly bothered that some of the facts have been switched or altered in this memoir to enhance the reader's experience,' adds another. 'To me it makes sense to alter facts and timelines to make a story read well.' What's important to these commentators is less the book's technical veracity than its ring of truth. Perhaps it feels more authentic for being less so. And yet, The Salt Path scandal has broken at a time when it is becoming more and more difficult to tell what's real and what isn't. Every day, we watch people accepting at face value news items that are demonstrably false. Old riots being passed off as new ones. A clip that shows Donald Trump saying the US should have sent weapons to Russia instead of Ukraine. At the same time actual events defy belief. Is Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok really sending out tweets praising Hitler? 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Still Game star Gavin Mitchell's dog poisoned in 'frightening' incident
Still Game star Gavin Mitchell's dog poisoned in 'frightening' incident

Daily Record

time12-07-2025

  • Daily Record

Still Game star Gavin Mitchell's dog poisoned in 'frightening' incident

Gavin Mitchell spoke about having to rush his beloved dog Bob to an emergency vet after ingesting poison. Still Game star Gavin Mitchell has revealed his beloved pet dog was left fighting for his life after swallowing poison. The actor, famed for his role as Boaby the Barman in the hit BBC TV comedy, was left shocked after his dog, Bob, began suffering seizures. ‌ He rushed the distressed pooch for emergency treatment as vets told him they believed the animal had ingested poison. ‌ After an overnight stay, Mitchell said experts hope Bob is on the road to recovery but warned his pet is not out of the woods yet. Experts told Mitchell not to visit Bob, adopted in 2019 from a Glasgow rescue centre, amid fears it may stress the dog. He said: 'After a long, sleepless, dark and teary night, I've been told 'he's amazing'. 'He woke hungry as always, tail wagging and walked, albeit somewhat unsteadily. He has had no more seizures so far and the antitoxin drugs have been doing their job. 'However, we're not out of the woods yet. There's still a problem with his left side and left eye after all the seizures. So they want to keep him in again overnight for observation. ‌ Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. 'At the moment, no MRI or further investigation, they do think it was something he ate that poisoned him. ‌ 'Please, keep those fingers crossed for him. It's been an awful, dark and frightening 24 hours or so. We're not quite there yet but my boy is a fighter and a survivor and so am I. I just want to hold him!' Mitchell also pleaded with fans not to use poison to deal with vermin and issued a stark warning to yobs who harm pets. He added: 'If you put down poison for vermin, please, know that it can also attract and affect other domestic animals. 'Or if there are 'vermin' out there who have done this for kicks, I will f*****g end every single last one of you.'

Loved Kenan & Kel? Run, don't walk, to this nostalgia-inducing Brooklyn burger fest next month
Loved Kenan & Kel? Run, don't walk, to this nostalgia-inducing Brooklyn burger fest next month

Time Out

time01-07-2025

  • Time Out

Loved Kenan & Kel? Run, don't walk, to this nostalgia-inducing Brooklyn burger fest next month

If you were a '90s kid who grew up in America like I was, it's highly likely that you too fought your parents for the remote to catch SNICK or Saturday Night Nickelodeon. A golden era of programming for kids and pre-teens, the two-hour block was filled with hit after hit, from the sarcastic and funny Melissa Hart in Clarissa Explains It All, to the semi-legit scary tales of Are You Afraid of the Dark? But a favorite in my house? The pint-sized version of Saturday Night Live but for kids: All That. Breakout stars of the show, Ken Thompson and Kel Mitchell received a spin-off sitcom of their own in 1996, Ken & Kel, following up with the movie, Good Burger, inspired by their skit on the sketch comedy show. And this summer, one of the beloved actors will be heading to NYC this Labor Day weekend, bringing us together for all the nostalgic feels and tons of burgers. On Saturday, August 30, Kel Mitchell is bringing his first-ever Kel's Burger Fest to Brooklyn. Teaming up with Bucket Listers, the one-day fest held at Williamsburg's BK Backyard Bar will bring music, games and some of the best burgers from across the country, New York included. While the burger lineup has yet to be officially announced, the all-out extravaganza will feature over-the-top creations, smashburgers and even a few vegan patties thrown in the mix. "This is more than a food festival—it's a full-on burger bonanza,' said Mitchell in a press release. 'We're bringing the energy, the flavor, and the fun together for a truly unforgettable day. Whether you grew up watching my shows or just love a good burger, this is the fest is for you." But for those of us who religiously watched Kenan & Kel, the question remains: Will there be orange soda? With Mitchell onsite, yes—orange soda will most definitely be had. Not only will there be an orange soda fountain to quench your thirst, but you can also profess your obsession for the fizzy drink by participating in the orange soda chugging contest. (If you fear you just might choke on all that carbonation, save your energy for the '90's Dance Battle or the "Finish That Song' game, also hosted by Mitchell.) The day rounds out with carnival rides, a retro game lounge and a DJ spinning all the hits from the era.

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