Margaret Mitchell: In This Place, a family revisited after 22 years

Family, 1994

The earlier series, Family, was made in 1994 and began as a project about Mitchell's sister and her experience as a parent. It became something else quickly — a story about three children and the world they had built between them, which the photographer was allowed to glimpse rather than enter.

That world was at times tender and tough, loving and bewildering. The three children had a distinct interconnected life, existing inside a cocoon of support for and from one another; their experience was interdependent, and their mother was present mainly at the periphery, to feed and clothe and wash. Mitchell has written that at the time she thought it unimportant that these were members of her own extended family, and yet by calling the work Family she wanted to claim the photographs while leaving them open.

In This Place, 2016 onwards

In This Place updates the story of the same children and where their lives have taken them as adults. In the intervening years their mother died and all three started families of their own, with seven children between them. All have moved from one housing estate in Central Scotland — one poised to undergo urban regeneration — to another in the same town, where they live in similar flats in pockets that redevelopment has not yet reached.

The project began, Mitchell has said, with a second loss that followed her sister's death: a growing disconnection from her sister's children and especially from her sister's grandchildren, which she wanted to repair. Photography was the reason and the justification to be there, an entry point rather than a plan.

Behind the personal connection sits a larger narrative of social mobility, environment and choice. Life in the housing estates of Central Scotland is described in the work as static — the only change since 1994 being movement from one area scoring high on the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation to another, a simple bus ride across town. Against that backdrop of parental loss and limited options, the glue that binds the original three remains: similar flats, the same area, intertwined as they were more than two decades earlier.

A practice on childhood, place and belonging

Mitchell is a photographer based in Glasgow whose overarching interest is in people and their stories, with childhood, youth, place and belonging recurring across the work. She often photographs children and young people — people in the middle of establishing a sense of self, sometimes in transformation from one state to another — and the inner and lived worlds of others are central to what the photographs try to carry.

Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the European Parliament and at the National Portrait Gallery as part of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize.

Alongside her own practice her interests span curating, teaching and participatory arts. She set up The Story Portrait, an online journal in which photographers discuss a single one of their portraits, and having lectured in photography for over a decade she continues to work in community and collaborative arts settings.

Two bodies of work made twenty-two years apart in the same families produce something a single project cannot: evidence. The 1994 series recorded three children with a distinct shared world; the later series records the same three as adults, in flats of the same kind, in the same town. Whatever conclusions a viewer draws about social mobility, they are drawn from the interval rather than from an argument the photographs make.

The insider position deserves a note of its own, because it cuts both ways. Photographing one's own extended family removes the hardest problem in social documentary — access and its ethics — and replaces it with a different one: the photographer cannot leave. An outside documentarian who spends a month on an estate departs with the pictures; Mitchell's relationship to her subjects continued through her sister's death, the disconnection that followed it, and the repair the second project was partly made to perform. That continuing obligation is legible in the work's restraint. Nothing in either series is staged to sharpen the deprivation statistics that frame it, and the interiors are photographed as homes rather than as evidence. The result is a rare register in British poverty documentary: material circumstance recorded accurately, by someone with no exit, and therefore without the visiting eye's appetite for the bleak.