Tyler Mitchell: the photographer of the moment

EVERY YEAR the Aperture Foundation hosts a ritzy gala in New York to raise money and fete those it considers “leaders in the field” of photography. (It also publishes a magazine, likewise called Aperture, arguably the world’s most prestigious photography title.) The distinction tends to be given to artists to acknowledge decades of work: Graciela Iturbide won in 2021, aged 79, and Richard Misrach in 2024, aged 75.

This year, however, Aperture celebrated Tyler Mitchell, who seems to have conquered the world of photography at the tender age of 30. His strikingly beautiful images straddle fine art and fashion and his work is adored by curators, collectors and magazine editors. He is already earning comparisons to Richard Avedon, one of the best-known fashion and portrait photographers of the 20th century.

Mr Mitchell’s work is in vogue—and in Vogue. He rose to fame in 2018, when he became the first black photographer to shoot a cover in the magazine’s 126-year history. He depicted Beyoncé, a pop star, in a floral head-dress; Artsy, an online art marketplace, duly labelled him a “breakout talent”. Since then, he has photographed Kamala Harris, then the vice-president-elect, for Vogue; his work has been acquired by Sir Elton John and David Furnish and displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; and he has shot the catalogue for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fashion exhibition, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style”, about the modern dandy.

In October “Riverside Scene from Dreaming in Real Time”, a large image reminiscent of a famous painting by Georges Seurat, a post-Impressionist, sold for $54,180 at auction. This was double the estimate and set a new record for his work. A travelling early-career survey, “Wish This Was Real”, is currently on display at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and is accompanied by a monograph. You would expect Gagosian, the contemporary-art gallery which began representing Mr Mitchell in 2024, to call him a “leading artist of his generation”, but it seems it has a point.

Mr Mitchell was born in Albany, Georgia, in 1995. He turned to photography and film as a creative outlet as a teenager; he took up skateboarding and began making montage videos of other skaters. It was a few years later, while enrolled in New York University’s film and television programme, that he decided to focus on photography. “I saw it as a way I could quickly tell visual stories and speak to culture without waiting for a larger budget or crew,” he explains.

He credits black artists and photographers such as Gordon Parks, Roy DeCarava and Carrie Mae Weems as influences. A visit to Cuba when he was 20 also proved formative. This trip, which he describes as a “visual awakening”, allowed him to develop his own aesthetic and produce a large enough body of work to establish a portfolio. Evident in these early pictures is Mr Mitchell’s flair with colour—a look Emily Bierman, the global head of prints and photographs at Sotheby’s, an auction house, describes as “hyper-saturated”.

Textiles are a recurring motif in Mr Mitchell’s work, be it billowing sheets, patchworked denim or fishing nets. (The backdrop of the Beyoncé cover was a simple cotton sheet pegged to a washing line.) This gives his images depth as well as a faintly dreamlike quality.

His photographs are “lightly staged”, in that Mr Mitchell will gather groups of models who have a certain charisma, dress them, place them in a specific location, give them props and then let the scene play out. He often depicts people at ease, catching them in calm or playful moments. (In one image, an insect rests on a young man’s nose.) His subjects are people of colour; he has described his artistic world as something like a “black utopia”.

Regardless of the commission, Mr Mitchell works in a similar way. He says he seeks to convey “a sort of fluidity and slippage between these categories of photography: ‘art’, ‘fashion’, ‘portraiture’, ‘abstraction’, or any of the other sub-genres”. He hopes his images, wherever they end up, underscore the point of photography as an art form: to encourage viewers “to empathise and to see and to look”. ■