Scarecrows by Peter Mitchell is a long-term project made between 1974 and 2015 in the rural landscape of Yorkshire, centering on faceless scarecrows as stand-ins for human presence. Emerging from Mitchell’s partner’s move to the countryside, the work began as a personal coping strategy for a self-described city bloke who preferred pavements to fields. Over four decades he repeatedly returned to these makeshift figures, assembled from society’s detritus and stranded, as he suggests, between heaven and earth, using them to think through questions of endurance, vulnerability, and the passage of time.
Visually, the photographs describe lonely figures in muddy English fields, often isolated against empty horizons and muted skies. Mitchell frequently adopts a low, almost child’s-eye viewpoint that makes the scarecrows feel both tentative and imposing, as if the viewer is edging closer to something half-familiar. Their blank heads, outstretched arms, egg-yolk-yellow raincoats, and sagging garments introduce an uncanniness that complicates the pastoral setting, folding melancholy, quiet humor, and a lightly spiritual tone into the same frame.
Working primarily with a medium-format camera, Mitchell produces square-format color images whose subdued palette emphasizes worn fabric, patched clothing, and improvised supports. Great care in printing and color control underpins the work’s seemingly casual encounters.
Reception of Scarecrows has been shaped in part by the way the series was recontextualized within the autobiographical Some Thing means Everything to Somebody (2015). There the scarecrow pictures are sequenced alongside photographs of objects from his life, encouraging viewers to read them as proxies for an ordinary human figure and as one strand in a broader life story. As a standalone project, however, Scarecrows is usually discussed in terms of its long time span, its quiet attention to mortality and rural change, and its contribution to consolidating Mitchell’s late recognition. Exhibitions such as the retrospective Nothing Lasts Forever (Leeds Art Gallery, 2024; The Photographers’ Gallery, London, 2025) have helped fix this reading while underscoring his position within the history of color photography in Britain.
