Early Sunday Morning

Peter Mitchell
Early Sunday Morning

Photographs: Peter Mitchell

Publisher: RRB Photobooks

180 pages

Year: 2020

Comments: Hardcover, grey boards, 250 x 300 mm. Edit and sequence by John Myers.

The book is made up of over 90 largely unpublished images, each one selected from a cache of five hundred negatives which have sat unseen for over 30 years.

Early Sunday Morning, edited and sequenced by John Myers, shows a different Leeds to Mitchell’s earlier publications. It is neither the sombre 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 of Mitchell’s own Leeds.

The book reveals the layers of the city’s history, exposed by the changes to the urban landscape that epitomised the 1970s and 80s. Hundred-year-old terraces and cobbled streets sit flanked by concrete flats, with newly cleared ground to either side are presented with Mitchell’s typical graphic framing.