Dear Nasa, please send me to Mars! The photographer who showed Britain – and space – in colour | Photography

The Quarry Hill flats in Leeds were once the largest social housing complex in the UK. A utopian vision of homes for 3,000 people. Built in the 1930s, they were modelled on the Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna and La Cité de la Muette in Paris. However, after just 40 years, the buildings were crumbling and largely deserted. Over the course of five years in the 1970s, Peter Mitchell documented their demolition, from smashed windows and wrecked apartments to abandoned wardrobes and solitary shoes. Finally, when all that was left standing was a lone arch, he tried to photograph the wrecking crew standing in front of it, but couldn’t get the arch in.

“So,” Mitchell remembers, “the foreman said, ‘We do have a crane.’ I can’t stand heights but they lowered the crane down so I could stand on it, then lifted me up to quickly get the shot. I was swaying about a bit and all but one of them came out blurred – but I got the picture.”

Mitchell laughs gently at the memory. Now 82, he is one of the 20th century’s most important early colour photographers and social historians. He has been called “a narrator of how we were, a chaser of a disappearing world”. Yet he insists he just photographs “things that take my eye. Sometimes, I’d see something and think, ‘I’ll come back when it’s not raining.’ Then I’d go back and it had been knocked down.”

We’re talking ahead of his new London exhibition Nothing Lasts Forever, which he thinks will be his last, but we meet in the ornate tiled cafe of Leeds Art Gallery, which hosted the exhibition last year and first showed his photos in 1975, when it was the City Art Gallery. He remembers that the new curator Sheila Ross wasn’t hugely impressed by his silkscreen prints. “But then she said, ‘I like your photos.’”

Mitchell’s work exudes warmth and empathy. Although he’s known for shots of what he calls “dying buildings”, some of his most powerful images capture people in the workplace and the dignity of their labour. From the early 1970s to the 2010s, he photographed fairground showman Francis Gavan alongside his gradually more weatherbeaten ghost train ride, which thrilled/terrified generations of schoolchildren (including myself) on Woodhouse Moor, then Pottery Fields – before suddenly both were gone.

“He built it himself and was proud of it,” Mitchell remembers. “I think eventually the authorities deemed it unsafe.” After Gavan died, his family came to see Mitchell’s photos, and the ghost train’s giant skull is now in his cellar. “Which would be quite a shock for anyone going down there.”

Mitchell has always been fascinated by “the glory of the wreckage”. Born in Eccles, near Manchester, he was relocated to Catford in London during the second world war and fondly remembers playing in air-raid shelters and bombed-out buildings. In his teens he held on to childhood things most people leave behind – toys, Airfix model kits, diaries – and he still has them to this day.

After leaving school at 16, he trained as a cartographic draughtsman for the civil service but felt unfulfilled, so eight years later enrolled to study typography and graphic design at Hornsey College of Art, where a visiting Italian photographer inspired him to pick up a camera. “But I had always believed,” he says, “a photograph could be as powerful as a painting.”

Mitchell came to Leeds in 1972 to visit a friend, fell in love with the Victorian architecture and never left, renting a place in Chapeltown for £2.50 a week and working as a van driver while he became established. On his first day in the city he visited Beckett Street cemetery. “There were lots of gravestones for babies who’d died from cholera,” he says. “I did a lot of photography that first day.”

He made a major impact with his groundbreaking 1979 exhibition A New Refutation of the Space Viking 4 Mission – the first colour exhibition by a British photographer in a British gallery, namely Impressions in York. It was inspired by the 1976 Viking probes to Mars, although Mitchell gave it a twist, imagining that an alien craft had landed on Earth, in Leeds to be precise, and begun to take photos.

“I knew a student who’d written to Nasa asking what qualities you needed to become a spaceman and received a reply,” he explains. “So I wrote to Nasa myself and received a humorous letter. ‘Dear Mr Mitchell. We understand you want to go to Mars. If you give us a couple of million, we can get you up there. But if you just want a picture, we can send you one for nothing.’”

They sent him more than one, in fact, and Mitchell enlarged these Martian landscapes and exhibited them alongside his own images of decaying Leeds, adorned with map coordinates as if from a space mission. “A public school in the countryside borrowed the collection for a project on the solar system,” he grins. “They said, ‘These aren’t astronomy at all. They look like they were taken with a Kodak seaside camera.’”

In fact, they were taken with the same 1950s Hasselblad camera (“the Blad”) that Mitchell has carried with him for over half a century. Every photo taken by the Blad, it seems, has a story.

Take his striking shot of a biker gang in front of a motorcycle mural that adorned the side of a Leeds house. “I just happened by,” he says. “Two girls were leaning against an old Porsche, a bit of a wreck really. One guy was sitting on his bike and another bloke behind him was threatening somebody. I didn’t want to interrupt, so I said, ‘I’ll just take a picture.’” Later, Porsche offered him £300 to publish the photo in their magazine. “I said they could have it for nothing as long as they sent me a copy. They did and alongside my picture was a bigger one of the very same car, roaring around the tracks – as it once had been.”

The Blad has also documented decades of social change, including the impact of multiculturalism on the city. A photograph of Caribbean sound system Sir Yank’s Heavy Disco was taken during the annual carnival, in the days when DJs would pile loudspeakers in front gardens and run power cables out of every window looking out. “The day before the carnival, we’d always get a letter,” grins Mitchell. “It said, ‘Do not give them any electricity – because it’s dangerous.’” Sir Yank (“the boss of Yorkshire sounds”) ran a nearby record shop selling Jamaican imports, so Mitchell photographed that as well.

Another shot, called How Many Aunties?, captures the colourful chaos at an Asian wedding that took place in the backstreets near his house. “I went to put the rubbish out,” says Mitchell, “and saw cars draw up. A Sikh chap was trying to take a photo but couldn’t get everyone in and all the women were drifting back inside. I ran up my steps, grabbed the camera from the kitchen, and told them, ‘I’ll take it!’”

Occasionally, he shot interiors, such as Concorde Wallpaper, snapped on a bedroom wall. He glimpsed it through a window and politely asked to photograph it. “It’s a bad shot really, a bit blurred,” he says. “But it became really popular. A few years ago, a nice illustrator gave me a big piece of that same wallpaper in exchange for a large copy of my photo. She’d seen it somewhere, gone inside and prised it off.”

Throughout it all, he has remained in Chapeltown, in the same house. Last year it was burgled four times, but recently a silver Audi pulled up and a man got out and expressed an interest in buying the place. “Then he went, ‘Do you still live here? I used to jump off that wall when I was a kid.’ He couldn’t believe it had been the same person in the house all this time.”

Meanwhile the city changes around him. Mitchell is dismayed whenever Victoriana is replaced by some big bit of boring plastic, but he still gets a childlike thrill from discovering a hidden gem, such as the century-old butcher’s shop he came across recently with “beautiful green tiling”.

Although he doesn’t walk the streets with the Blad as much as he used to, he still likes to get around and does “little bits of photography” when he can. “The Blad’s almost too heavy for me to use now,” he says. “But someone’s knitted me a woollen replica. When I go to the exhibition, I’m going to carry that.”