Last year, in the second national lockdown, a series of posters were hung in various locations around Leeds. They exhibited Pete Mitchell’s photographs of the city from the seventies and eighties by putting them back into urban space. At the billboards situated at the top of Victoria Road at Hyde Park Corner, you could see Mitchell’s photos of Hyde Park and Woodhouse blown up in size, acting as a form of time travel. Decontextualised, the images reflected the city back to itself, a commentary on how Leeds has changed over the past thirty or forty years.

The photographs came from Mitchell’s recent book Early Sunday Morning, and the billboards were a collaboration between the Leeds bookshop Colours May Vary and Mitchell himself. Forced to rethink the original physical exhibition that tied in with the publication of Mitchell’s book, Colours May Vary worked with Leeds company FYI and Leeds Civic Trust to place these images on poster drums and billboards as an open-air exhibition. The bookshop said that it wasn’t their intention to ‘use the spaces to promote a product or an event’, but ‘to present this wonderful archive of Leeds Heritage to the public for them to be viewed in their own time, on their own streets.’ They continued that they hoped ‘the photos would evoke memories, stories and reflections on how the city has changed and how it has to change again to adapt to our new future.’

The images are presented in a context that is primarily associated with commercial and marketing activities. In some ways, the photographs benefited from this context – the graphic square framing of the photographs worked well at this scale, re-situated in the city streets that they depict. The series worked well sequentially too – there was a pleasing sense of repetition and standardisation, as well as a variety and heterogeneity that perhaps riffs off the similar visual impact of advertising billboards. It is no surprise that Mitchell himself was a graphic designer before he became renowned as a photographer. These billboards are a form of public speaking, so I wondered: who is speaking here? Is it Colours May Vary, a ‘design’ bookshop with a clientele coming from the city’s arts schools and its design, marketing, and creative economy? What does this culture understand about the city’s ‘heritage’, about its history? In the words of Colours May Vary, what does it say about the way the city must change again to ‘adapt to our new future?’ And when the word ‘our’ is used, who is the ‘we’ that is being inferred?

Certainly in their recent campaign, prominently displayed all over the city in the aftermath of Brexit, HSBC were happier using the second-person ‘you’ in preference to the old Leeds United chant ‘We Are Leeds’ to address a city that understood itself as both a proud northern city with a real identity, while also understanding its part in a wider nexus of neoliberal capital. Perhaps this notion of ‘we’ was seen as too aggressive, too much a hangover from the football hooliganism of the seventies and eighties. Perhaps it suggested notions of being ‘united,’ of socialism. So what is ‘our new future?’ And how might it relate to a series of billboard posters of photographs of Leeds from the last thirty years?

The images, being situated in quite close proximity to the locations they had originally been photographed in, immediately struck up a conversation with their immediate surroundings – sometimes very closely, but at other times the relationships were more tangential. One picture shows the old bookshop on Hyde Park Corner in close relation to its present incarnation as a vintage/retro store that caters largely for a student population. Even for those who are too young or who might have come to Leeds quite recently, there would be a glimmer of recognition, even if this is simply a matter of matching up rooflines and small architectural details from the photograph to real life. The photograph is taken from the opposite side of the road, from the perspective of someone walking, a view of a building many will have passed without taking the time to reflect on.

Do we really engage with the history that these images purport to represent, or does this simply provide a fuzzy, warm sense of nostalgia? Perhaps they accelerate the process by which Leeds starts to self-mythologise its past. Manchester has been notably adept at selling its own recent history, whether through Kevin Cummins’ photographs of post-punk Brutalist infrastructure or Shirley Baker’s photographs of street life in the sixties and seventies. There is an undeniable wistfulness about Pete Mitchell’s images that could have come from a much earlier time – apart from the tell-tale signs of Kodachrome seventies/eighties colour photography. The sensibility is of a particular postwar ‘austerity nostalgia’, and where perhaps the Manchester bands photographed by Cummins saw the post-industrial ruins and remnants as a kind of Ballardian dystopia, here there is something more romantic about the disappearance of this working-class city, something of Richard Hoggart in its evocation of the disappearance of an ‘authentic’ working class.

The photographs arguably suggest to a contemporary audience an infinitely poorer but more authentic world, frozen in its rough glory. Alternatively, these images instruct a student audience passing by that their temporary playground for three years of undergraduate study, has a real, hard history that their ‘soft city’ is superimposed upon and overlaps with. Does it open their eyes to another Leeds, an industrial and working-class city?

Leeds is an interesting test-bed for thinking about northern England. It voted by a marginal proportion in favour of Remain at the Brexit referendum in 2016, and is a city divided along class lines, an educated metropolitan demographic coming hard up against a post-industrial working-class similar to that of the so-called ‘left behind’ towns of West Yorkshire that surround it. It is perhaps no coincidence that the Tories have decided to base their future northern operations in Leeds, faced with the fervent hostility of both Manchester and Liverpool. So do these photographs, exhibited in this new context, work to redress these divides, to heal or at least draw attention to the conflicts between these two sides of Leeds, or do they plaster over these cracks? Do they pour salt into these wounds by representing these locations and historical moments as exotic for a student audience?

Perhaps this is what is troubling about these photographs’ new context. We are supposed to read the images as a part of what Harun Farocki called a ‘soft montage’ with the contemporary world we walk through, not simply as a window onto an old world to disappear into. This may be what happens to older viewers like me – the photographs allow us to give ourselves over to that old leftist melancholic introspection. But we really need to think about what these images say about the present day. They remind us that the city is built and rebuilt by us, not just those wider forces of commerce and industry and council planners. They remind us that the city is as much an idea as it is about solid built form, and that ideas are fluid and changeable. They remind us that the present moment is most important, that the ordinary can be extraordinary, and that we simply need the perspective on the ordinary that time and reflection might allow us.

The Leeds of these photographs is one that was poorer but more dynamic, where opportunities existed because the cracks were larger and more visible. It was a Leeds that had a sense of its own identity rather than one outsourced and hawked around property developers, marketing and PR companies, with their new plans for Quarry Hill as the embarrassingly named ’SOYO’ (South of York Road). Perhaps these images should be a call to arms for a new Leeds that is based on the bravery of looking forwards, past the lowered horizons of the pandemic which has exacerbated our isolation, our atomisation and our longing for the past, to remake a city that truly represents those on its margins and in its peripheries.