Every now and again, we come across someone whose work stops us in our tracks. The kind of stuff that makes you all stop and crowd around the computer of whoever has happened to stumble across it... Harry Mitchell is a photographer who made us do just that and after meeting with him a few weeks back, I could tell that he was a photographer with a lot of substance behind his style.
When did you first start getting into photography?
Cameras, lenses and monitors of different kinds were always around my house growing up. My parents work in film, so films and pictures were always around. I also remember Cartier-Bresson books and in particular, Josef Koudelka’s Exiles lying around. When I was 12, I took a darkroom course and learned how to develop film and make basic prints. It wasn’t really until about 5 years after that that I began to take photographs more regularly and seriously though.
Who are your inspirations in photography? Whose work do you really connect with?
I’m inspired by my friends and contemporaries as much as I am well established photographers. In the former – Tom Jamieson, Marco Kesseler and Matt Martin are just a few. In the latter, I tend to be into pretty specific projects or bodies of work. Luc Delahaye’s Winterreise and Gilles Peress’ work from Bosnia and also a recent project by Zhang Kechun called The Yellow River. Avedon’s portraits, which a friend recently made me pay attention to, and Pari Dukovic is also a wizard in that area.
I’m inspired by my friends and contemporaries as much as I am well established photographers.
How much do you feel photography is really just down to chance, and does chance play a part in your work?
Sure it does but it depends how much you want to pick that word apart. I feel like chance is prevalent in any given situation, camera or not. If it has a close relationship to luck, then a lot of photography is to do with making your own luck. Or it could just be down to how superstitious you are.
Can you share with us some of your favourite work from previous projects and why?
The below picture is from an unfinished project I started in Bosnia last year. At the time I’d been having a really shitty month. I ended up wandering around Europe a little bit and wound up in Sarajevo, which I had wanted to visit for a while. I’d read some journalistic writing about the war, but while I was there I picked up a book of fiction by Miljenko Jergovic, which described, in a Kafka-esque way, small anecdotes of city life during the siege.
Feeling pretty emotionally disconnected and unable to speak the language, most of the pictures I made during the few days I was there were at a certain distance.
I tried to pick up on small dramas or scenes that were suggestive, almost like a diorama, of a bigger tale. In this photograph I was reminded of some of the passages from the book, these kids hanging out in the late afternoon sun on an overgrown, weedy and pretty cold concrete landscape. They don’t care about me, and it’s quiet. I was reminded instantly of hanging out in similar places when I was a kid – I suppose that’s the obvious connection to make. But I also like the obvious distance between where I’m standing and where they are, emphasised a bit by the stale looking yellow weeds in the foreground.
Words of advice? Don’t rush
One project that caught oureyes the most at Gather.ly, is ‘Someone loves someone else’. Tell us how you came to discover this story, what inspired you?
I went to Egypt in spring 2012. I spent about a month there in total over two trips. The story – Egypt – was pretty hard to ignore if you paid any attention to the news or looked at a paper from time to time. My curiosity was hooked by the pictures coming from there, but I was more interested in what wasn’t being shown – the quotidian parts of city life familiar to me.
Looking towards the future, Harry tells us that he has a few ideas sketched out in sticky-note form on his wall. "Hopefully this will start to get a bit clearer soon. I would love to go back to Cairo though."
We're sure whatever adventures Harry choses to take on next will be beautifully documented through his photography. We're looking forward to following him and be sure to look out for Harry's work in the next issue of The Quarterly.
