Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody

Peter Mitchell's Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody tells an autobiography sideways, through faceless scarecrows standing alone in empty Yorkshire fields.

Mitchell photographed scarecrows he sought out specifically because they had no face, treating them as stand-ins for absence and memory, and interleaves these images with photographs of ordinary personal objects collected across four decades. Handcrafted typography and a deliberately disjointed sequence carry the narrative rather than explanatory text, so the book reads as a private history told through things rather than people. It was published by RRB Photobooks in Yorkshire in 2015, in a limited edition of 950 copies, some including a signed print.

Mitchell, a Leeds-based photographer associated with the British color-documentary tradition of the 1970s and 80s, first gained wider attention decades after making the work later collected in Strangely Familiar, his survey of Leeds's industrial edges and eccentric local characters. Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody extends that same close, particular attention to place into a more personal, autobiographical register.