Tyler Mitchell. The Root of all that lives, 2020.
Photo Khashyar Javanmardi
Since his arrival on the scene in 2018, barely 23 years old, Tyler Mitchell has changed the way we look at style, beauty, stories, family. He has blown open the beauty ideal promoted by fashion magazines for generations. Tyler Mitchell barged onto our consciousness with the cover he shot of Beyoncé for Vogue's most prestigious September issue. There’s some irony in the fact that he was chosen to shoot the cover of a magazine which had been the main promoter of the WASP ideal of beauty and style - blond, blue eyed, Ivy League beauty.
Photo Khashyar Javanmardi
The young photographer who is represented by mega gallery Gagosian (he had a significant show at Paris Photo, last fall, confronting his images to the work of another icon, Richard Avedon), is showing Wish This Was Real, at Lausanne’s Photo Elysée, an exhibition which will be shown in Paris’s Maison européenne de la Photographie in October. Instead of just his images, Tyler Mitchell is showing works from other artists who have inspired him - Gordon Parks, Carrie Mae Weems, the designer Grace Wales Bonner, Garrett Bradley, Rashid Johnson, Baldwin Lee and a few others.
The work has a dreamlike feel. These are the lives Black people can have away from the injustices and harsh reality of their daily life. Tyler Mitchell, allows his subjects and his viewers to dream of a better life, hence the title of his show, Wish This Was Real. The work is also about power. The people in front of his camera are in control of their destiny, they reclaim their life. Instead of a life of labor, Tyler Mitchell’s subjects are playing, enjoying the company of each other, celebrating their beauty and style, dictating the life they want to create for themselves, yet, in his photographs, everyone is serious, no one is smiling. Nature is also very present in Tyler’s images. One of the 3 sections of the exhibition is called Postcolonial/Pastoral. Black people in the American South - Tyler Mitchell comes from Georgia (Atlanta), one of the most segregated States until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - were mostly connected to the land as sharecroppers or for picking fruit. In Mitchell’s images, the land acquires a mystical aura. It’s the land of pleasure and community, something not afforded to Black people.
Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Red Steps), 2016
In just a few years, the photographer, born in 1995, has injected a new energy and optimism in fashion images. The photos he has taken for the Met’s Costume Institute new show, Tailoring Black Style, are a vivid example of the quiet and vibrant revolution he has triggered in the world of fashion and magazine photography. In these dark times, Tyler Mitchell’s work brings some light to us, a measure of joy mixed with deep seriousness. We all wish this was real.
~Jean-Sébastien Stehli
Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real, Photo Elysée, Lausanne. elysee.ch. Until 08.17.25
Tyler Mitchell, Curtain call (2018)
