Early Sunday Morning, published by RRB Photobooks in 2020, returns to a body of work Peter Mitchell had left untouched for more than three decades. Ninety of the photographs in this 176-page hardcover had never appeared in print; Mitchell selected them from a cache of five hundred negatives that had remained unseen for over thirty years. The volume is thus inseparable from the act of excavation— an archive re-entered, held up to the light, and given a deliberate new order.
That order was devised by the editor and sequence-maker John Myers, and it is decisive. Mitchell’s earlier publications had taken one of two stances: a sombre inventory of destruction in Memento Mori, or a knowingly detached observation of his adopted home in A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission. Early Sunday Morning adopts neither tone. It turns instead to a different, more intimate document of Mitchell’s own Leeds, a city in the midst of the upheavals that came to characterise the 1970s and 1980s. Hundred-year-old terraces and cobbled streets sit alongside concrete flats and newly cleared ground. Mitchell’s characteristic graphic framing keeps these disparities taut, flattening them into pictures whose quietness does not hide their pressure.
The book never announces its subject. Social change is registered obliquely, through what is omitted, abandoned, or about to begin: a gap between buildings, a scraped lot, a street whose scale no longer matches its surroundings. The atmosphere is at once plainly documentary and carefully composed. Renewal and ruin are held in close relation, with neither outcome promised.
For the serious collector, Early Sunday Morning matters as a sustained encounter with a less familiar current in Mitchell’s practice, one built on a remarkable reservoir of unseen negatives and shaped by Myers’s editorial judgment. Its questions are wider than its setting: how a city keeps its own history legible, how redevelopment transforms perception, and how photographic form can make visible processes too slow or too dispersed to be narrated otherwise. The overdue publication of these pictures is itself proof that an archive, left alone for long enough, can eventually speak in a new key.
