Nothing Lasts Forever.

Photographs by Peter Mitchell. Essay by Diane Smyth. Preface by Jane Bhoyroo.

RRB Photobooks, 2024. English, 148 pp., 9½x9½".

Nothing Lasts Forever is the first retrospective monograph of work by Peter Mitchell, best-known for his chronicles of the city of Leeds.

The book acts as a visual guide to navigate Mitchell’s long-rooted and poetic connection with Leeds. Regarded as the one of the most important early colour photographers of the 20^th century, the book illustrates how words and objects have also played a key role in developing his distinctive and accessible vision.

Nothing Lasts Forever charts Mitchell’s work and career from his early photographs made in the 1970s and 80s whilst working as a truck delivery driver. His vantage point removed him from the immediacy of the street and he developed his distinctive graphic framing of the buildings and landscapes which reveal the layers of urban and social history. His documentation of the demise of the Quarry Hill Estate established his work beyond the mere visual into that of a social historian and storyteller—combining original documents, archival photographs, oral history, and observations to illustrate the complexities of change and failure.

The book introduces his unique storytelling abilities ranging from A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission which imagines an alien explorer visiting Leeds with a degree of surprise and puzzlement, through to the re-telling of his own autobiography by inanimate objects silently observed by otherworldly Yorkshire Scarecrows.

"This publication presents Peter’s photographs to a new generation and shares his unique and compelling vision which has the changing face of Leeds at its heart; its history as witnessed through the ruins of its buildings, the citizens who have lived here and remembering those who stand proudly in their place of work. In the words of Val Williams, Peter is ‘a narrator of how we were, a chaser of a disappearing world’. Nothing lasts forever." — Jane Bhoyroo, Principal Keeper Leeds Art Gallery

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Cat# ZK593S Softbound $50.00 (978-1-73851-630-8)
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