Margaret Mitchell

'Passage' incorporates Margaret Mitchell’s long-term projects 'Family' and 'In This Place' for the first time. Published by Bluecoat Press with a foreword by Alasdair Foster and texts by Mitchell.

“I want the viewer to ask themselves a question about how society operates, how choice is related to opportunity and environment. To see that sometimes people choose what they do because really, not much has been offered in the first place.” - Margaret Mitchell

PASSAGE brings together two connected bodies of work – 'Family' (1994) and 'In This Place' (2016-17) spanning more than 20 years in the lives of Margaret Mitchell’s extended family. Three generations lay out their lives reflecting not only on the personal but also the political, presenting a story of love and loss with social inequality at its heart. In 1994, Margaret Mitchell photographed her sister and her three children in a project that looked at familial bonds lived out under difficult social and economic circumstances. In 2016, Mitchell updated the family's story to document where their lives had taken them and the limitations that had followed them from childhood. The two pieces of work, side by side, expose the cyclical and inescapable nature of social inequality and prompt sobering questions about how a lack of opportunity in our childhoods influences and limits the choices we are able to make later in life. This work is at once extremely personal, and undeniably universal and political – a story of love and loss with social inequality at its heart. Do we have choices in life, or are some predetermined and made for us?