Found Photographs #002 – David Voss

15 years ago, a man named David Voss lived in the house that I currently live in. I know this because he left a box full of negatives, slides, prints and postcards, dating from 1989 to 1997 in the basement of the property. I spent several hours poring over the images, often having to peel apart prints that have become stuck together due to years of sitting in very damp conditions.

Although I have never met him, I feel like I know quite a lot about David Voss; he regularly went on skiing trips with his family, his mum and dad are from Bath but he moved to Leeds to live in this house, he collected Asterix comics and photographed them side by side and was a fan of Van Gogh paintings and Iron Maiden. He has a daughter, still a baby in ’96. Many of his friends appear throughout the years, a few make more fleeting appearances on school exchanges and proms or nights out. He is certainly a well travelled individual, with photographs taken all over Europe. And he was quite prolific in his recording of everyday life.

So what circumstances would have led David Voss to abandon all hundreds of photographs, memories spanning almost 10 years, in a damp cellar in Leeds? Photographs of family, friends, pets, trips, events, postcards and cards from abroad. I watched David Voss and those around him grow up over the hours I worked through the heaps of images, and immediately felt that he should be reunited with these images. Taken in a time before the digital technology boom, these are most likely the only copies of the photographs.

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‘I’m not actually socialist, I’m just grumpy really…’ – The Work of Peter Mitchell

I was lucky enough this week to be able to attend a talk by photographer Peter Mitchell as a part of the lecture series of the photography degree course at Leeds College of Art. When I learnt he would be giving a talk I decided to do some research into this practice. This proved to be very difficult- his work has no online presence, and as far as I can tell he has published one book based around his documentation of Quarry Hill flats, which has long since gone out of print. I think this is a real shame, because his is undoubtedly the most important body of work made about Leeds, and was using the medium of colour photography a decade before people such as Martin Parr and Paul Graham.

In the early 1970′s, Mitchell travelled to Leeds on a trip with a friend. He never left. Getting a job as a lorry driver in the city centre, he began photographing the rapidly changing city- businesses, breweries, pubs and social housing that was all later demolished. The photographs he created are all that is left of them- without Mitchell’s desire to document the city, we would have no record at all of how Leeds looked like before the massive redevelopment over the next two decades.

Before the move to Leeds, Mitchell had studied at Hornsea College of Art, where he spent his time silk screen printing and studying graphic design. Later, this practice would provide Mitchell with a way to fund his photographic practice, doing regular graphic design work for clients, as well as designing all his own exhibition posters and leaflets.

Following his first photographic exhibition at Leeds City Art Gallery, which featured actual pieces of ruined shop fronts at each end of the room, Mitchell was commissioned by Impressions Gallery, then based in York and being run by Val Williams and Andrew Sproxton. This led to the exhibition ‘A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission’ in 1979, in which Mitchell shot images almost as if aliens were looking at Leeds for the first time. The final prints had ‘calibration borders’ referencing those found on images shot on the moon. This led to him becoming the house designer for Impressions Gallery for the next 12 years.

Perhaps the best known body of work of Mitchell’s is based around Quarry Hill Flats, which he shot when they were already empty, shortly before they were due to be bulldozed. This became an exhibition and book entitled Memento Mori- 3,600 copies of this were published by Smith Settle in 1990, which sold out within a year or so of release.

Most recently, PSL created an exhibition in 2008 of Mitchell’s and Eric Jaquier’s depictions of Leeds in the 70′s, two outsiders who captured the city in very different ways, but both now allowing us an insight into life in a city far removed from the one we now inhabit.

Beyond a purely factual account of Mitchell’s body of work, what I found really inspiring was his attitude toward his photography. By continuing to make photographs of subjects over long periods of time, and using his archive to find themes that have been building up over time (‘the negatives come together like molecules’ as he eloquently put it), Mitchell must have an extraordinary document of Leeds. I feel like he is building up to a big exhibition or final outcome for this collection, and I truly hope so, because I think it would be something really special.

I’ve included what little information I could find on the internet about him, although it isn’t a lot!
Peter Mitchell Essay on ASX
Goodbye World – True North
The Colour Photographs Of Peter Mitchell – Simon Roberts 
Strangely Familiar at PSL

Richard Chappelow – District

I came across the work of Chappelow through the fonica magazine website (although it’s currently taking a break, the back issues are well worth a read for local artists and projects). I was drawn to the ‘District’ project in particular, as it draws upon the brutalist architecture that features within the main campus of Leeds University to create a dark and moody atmosphere. It is a testament to the fact that you don’t have to travel to faraway lands to create exciting photographs. I asked Chappelow to explain a little more about the work.

District is a collection of 12 images taken by my self and is inspired by science fiction movies from the 1970’s, the University of Leeds campus proved to be a visually striking location for this idea I had of capturing the cold and restricted environment that had played such a big role in the genre. I liked the contrast between the campuses purpose as a place of learning and progression, to that of a cold empty landscape, the architecture and campus could easily double for a controlled district of a city.

The project came together over a number of months, with a number of visits to the campus during different times of the day. I was fortunate enough to plan the shoot over the summer holidays when most students wouldn’t be present, giving me a greater chance to capture the campus in an empty state. All the images where take with 35mm SLR camera and presented in black and white, this was done intentionally as I felt the natural lighting was more striking and distinct, compared to colour.
One of the images from this collection was selected for the Leeds Art Gallery Open Show 2010 and was on display from August 8^th till September 19^th

Chappelow was born and raised in Leeds, leaving to study Media Production at the University of Lincoln, but returning after graduating. Although only studying photography for one of the years of university, he has continued to create photographic bodies of work, traditionally using black and white 35mm but now beginning to explore the possibilities of digital technology.

To see more of Chappelow’s work, head over to the fonica site.

Found Photographs #001

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A small collection of photographs found in Haworth in 2010. The shop has collections of music, books- almost anything. In one box there is a vast number of small photographs, which is where I found these. Whenever I rifle through it, I wonder- how did these images get to be here? They once belonged to someone- in this case, we assume the photographer is also the subject, as they utilize a mirror in order to see themselves. It was clearly a sort of ritual for this woman, as it has also become for many modern day teenagers. Whereas the fate of the modern self portrait is often social networking sites, what would the purpose be for these images? She presents herself as smiling and laughing. I wonder who she is trying to prove her happiness to, or if she is simply trying to affirm it within her own mind.

After talking with the owner of the shop, I learnt that most of the photographs are bought at a number of local auctions. Beyond this, I know nothing of their story, but perhaps this is part of their intrigue. I regularly hunt for these type of photographs, partly because in a city where I have no family of my own, it gives me a local history to wonder about and connect to in some way. They may not be people I know anything about, but their lost photographs provide a tiny window into their lives.

Daniel Meadows – Early Photographs at Ways of Looking Festival

Ways of Looking is a brand new photography festival based in Bradford, running throughout the month of October, and bringing photography to spaces right across the city centre, from Impressions Gallery and the National Media Museum to the urban park and Hungarian Centre. As well as this, events are being held to coincide with the exhibitions, and tying in with the festivals theme of ‘Evidence.’ I highly recommend spending a couple of days looking around the whole festival, and attending some of the excellent talks- including the ‘Photography on Trial’ debates, held in a stunning Victorian courtroom.

One of my personal highlights of the festival is the Daniel Meadows exhibition in the National Media Museum. Although I have known of Meadows for a long time and was familiar with his Free Photographic Omnibus project, this retrospective, curated by Val Williams (the original founder of Impressions Gallery and now Professor of the History and Culture of Photography, University of the Arts, London) inspired me to read anything I could get my hands on just to learn more about him and the Free Photographic Omnibus. In 1973, fresh out of university, Meadows spent £360 on a double decker bus and began a mammoth journey across England which would last over a year and see him travel 10,000 miles.

The journey consisted of Meadows parking in town centres in his bus and inviting people to have their portraits taken. He would then spend that night developing the images and making prints, and the next day the subjects would come back to collect them – all of this for free. He didn’t stop there though- twenty years later, he circulated the images in local newspapers in order to find the people again and re-photograph and interview them.

For Meadows, the end result isn’t just taking a striking visual image (although he has certainly succeeded in that respect too). Much more important is the representation of ordinary people, learning about their lives and passing on these stories to us as viewers. In todays celebrity obsessed media culture, its exciting looking at work by someone who totally rejects this idea, and champions ordinary people, people like you and me. He embraces elements of photographic practice that in my experience modern photographic education tries to play down- the importance of coincidence and following your gut, and the possibility of photography inspiring actual change in the world.

For further reading, The Bus by Daniel Meadows goes into the project in a lot more depth into some of the people involved in the project, Meadow’s own experiences on the bus and what happened when he tried to find his subjects again.
Daniel Meadows: Early Photographic Works is showing at National Media Museum until 19th February 2012.