On Strange and Familiar Ground

On Strange and Familiar Ground introduces a new audience to the work that brought Peter Mitchell recognition in the 21st century. The book remasters the 47 photographs Martin Parr originally selected for Strangely Familiar, Nazraeli's long out-of-print monograph, and adds new images and recent discoveries.

In the 1970s, Mitchell drove a delivery truck around Leeds and photographed the city between drops. He photographed shopkeepers in their doorways, factory gates, cafés, scrapyards, and terraced streets halfway to demolition. He worked slowly, with a medium-format camera and a stepladder, and his subjects posed willingly. The pictures are of affection for a city on the edge of change.

"Leeds is a city in the North where I've ended up and it's now where I'm from. … I'm surprised (though I shouldn't be) as I go through the neg files and notebooks just how familiar all the people and places are. All gone now … but as I stride down the new canyons of glittering emptiness that litter our cities, I hear my photographs chattering away." Peter Mitchell

The work was first shown in 1979 at Impressions Gallery in York, in the first colour exhibition by a British photographer at a British photography gallery. As Martin Parr writes in his introduction, the show was "so far ahead of its time that no-one knew exactly what to say or how to react, apart from with total bewilderment." It took decades for the work to receive its due.

This edition was newly scanned and remastered from Mitchell's archive. It keeps Parr's original introduction and sets the familiar images alongside photographs that have rarely or never been seen before.