Geoff Dyer in Conversation with Peter Mitchell – Sold out

SOLD OUT

This event is now sold out but attendees are welcome to make a ‘pay as you feel donation’ via the button below.

In this very special conversation event, acclaimed author Geoff Dyer will be speaking with photographer Peter Mitchell, whose life’s work is the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery. Geoff has previously written about Peter’s work for The New York Times Magazine and in his book ‘See/Saw: Looking at Photographs’ (2021) reflecting – “The first picture by Mitchell I ever saw had the same quality of oneiric lucidity associated with Ghirri: a red telephone box amid the desolate and lyrical emptiness of a housing estate in Leeds, something dropped out of time in the middle of nowhere, which — a fundamental lesson of photography — is always somewhere.”

The galleries will be open late this evening for attendees to see the exhibition. The exhibition can be accessed until 6pm and then after the talk finishes until 8pm.

More about the speakers

Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer is the author of many fiction and non-fiction books, including some acclaimed texts on photography: ‘The Ongoing Moment’ (an idiosyncratic history of photography) and, most recently, ‘See/Saw: Looking at Photographs’ published in 2021, an illuminating history of how photographs frame and change our perspectives. His 2016 essay on Peter Mitchell’s Scarecrow series of photographs, titled ‘The Startling Beauty of Scarecrows’, can be read in the New York Times Magazine online here.

Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography’s 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E.M. Forster Award. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.

Peter Mitchell

Regarded as one of the most important early colour photographers of the 20th century, Mitchell’s retrospective Nothing Lasts Forever marks nearly half a century since the photographer’s first exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery in 1975, and is being accompanied by a new publication. The exhibition is on until 6 October 2024. Known for documenting Leeds throughout his career, the exhibition will explore and reflect upon key bodies of work from Mitchell’s remarkable career and feature works previously unseen by the public.

SOLD OUT

The event is now fully booked, attendees can Pay As You Feel (suggested donation £5) – donate here.

Image credit: Guy Drayton

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