The end of industry

It was while browsing through more than 500 unpublished color negatives of Peter Mitchell (born in 1943) that John Myers (born in 1944) proposed to bring together their two photographic writings around the theme of the de-industrialization of Northern England in the 1970s and 1980s. Forty years later, the photographs in this exhibition resonate with the current economic crisis that is hitting the United Kingdom hard.

A pioneer of color photography in England, Peter Mitchell proposes a typography of a city steeped in history and exposed to urban change. His photographs of signs, concrete buildings, and abandoned Victorian buildings document the gradual decline of Leeds in the 1970s and 1980s.

Myers’ series of black-and-white images from 1981 to 1988 shows the destruction of the West Midlands region dubbed “The Black Country” during the Thatcher era: bankruptcy, factory closures, leaving thousands of people unemployed. It is this rapid and irreversible change that John Myers captures with a certain brutality in the tradition of American documentary photographers at the beginning of the 20th century. As Myers notes in his book The End of Industry (RRB, 2019) :

“Only recently have I begun to realize that, in their modest and incomplete way, these photographs capture one of the major changes in British landscape and society in the last half of the 20th century: the end of industrial society and the emergence of the world of mass retailing."