PHOTO: Tyler Mitchell-Ghost Images
Tyler Mitchell is renowned for his vibrant, playfully theatrical compositions that foreground the style and beauty of Black subjects, often within pastoral landscapes and familiar domestic settings. He draws from portraiture, fine-art photography, fashion, and filmmaking to create photographs and videos that offer utopian visions of empowerment, self-determination, tenderness, and camaraderie.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive
Tyler Mitchell studied film and television at New York University. His early work in fashion photography, remarkable for his bold use of color and effortless attention to style as a performance of self-determination, led to features in magazines including “i-D” and “Dazed”. In 2018, Mitchell was commissioned to photograph Beyoncé for American “Vogue’s” September issue, making history, at the age of twenty-three, as the first Black photographer to shoot the magazine’s cover. A testament to the cultural influence of the “New Black Vanguard,” a movement led by photographers navigating the intersection of fashion and art, Mitchell’s portrayals of Black leisure can also be seen as a form of resistance against violence and discrimination. Engaging with Southern gothic themes, Tyler Mitchell’s new images of seaside leisure, in his solo exhibition “Ghost Images”, are rooted in his Southern upbringing and explore the psychological space of memory, questioning how photographic tableaux might capture presences that are unseen but deeply felt. They also ask if photographs have the capacity to document memory and express self-determination in the light of history. This body of work was shot on Jekyll and Cumberland Islands, off the coast of Georgia, when Mitchell returned to his home state in preparation for “Idyllic Space”, his 2024 exhibition at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. The images are set among the beaches, dunes, estuaries, park structures, and ruins of these barrier islands, as landscapes of natural beauty that are imprinted with significant human histories. In 1858, the penultimate ship known to have transported enslaved people to the United States landed on Jekyll Island, an event to which the toy boats in “Gulfs Between, Voyage” and “Voyage II” allude. Now protected as national seashore, Cumberland Island is the site of a ruined mansion owned by the Carnegie family, who once controlled much of the island, and its burnt foundations form the setting of “Dollhouse”. In many of the works, Mitchell veils his subjects. “Gfhost Image” eatures a boy peering out through a shroud-like net, while the figures of “Gwen in the Rain”, “Convivial Conversation”, and “The sky is cold but the wing blood hot” are transformed by scrims of raincoat, sheet, and kite that channel the sunlight. The artist further explores layering and ephemerality by innovatively printing photographs onto mirrors, and onto sheets of fabric draped over empty frames. Inspired by photographers who were drawn to intangible aspects of space, spirit, and the human form, including Clarence John Laughlin, Frederick Sommer, and Francesca Woodman, Mitchell employs superimposition, multiple exposures, and fragmented composition to assert material presence while picturing apparitions of the past.
Photo: Tyler Mitchell, Cumberland Island Tableau, 2024, Archival pigment print, 63 x 78 inches (160 x 198.3 cm), Edition of 3 + 2 AP, © Tyler Mitchell, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 541 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 27/2-5/4/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/
