One of the fashion world’s most celebrated photographers was born in 1995 at Northside Hospital, came of age in Marietta, graduated from Westminster and spent his formative years skateboarding Atlanta’s streets, an activity that gave Tyler Mitchell a different view of life early on. “It led me to a creative community in Atlanta of other people who consider themselves to be kind of outsiders, really.”
In a sort of homecoming, the New York City-based photographer returns to his Atlanta stomping grounds for a solo exhibition at the High Museum. “Tyler Mitchell: Idyllic Space” is centered on work that treads a distinctive line between fashion and contemporary fine art photography.
The exhibition marks Mitchell’s reconnection with an institution that nurtured his view of self with exhibitions like the Gee’s Bend quilts. When he saw them at age 11, he recalled thinking, “These objects came from people that look like me, right?”
“Idyllic Space” is also an exhumation of self for Mitchell. It features more than 30 photographs and a “photo-sculptural” installation that pays homage to Mitchell’s privileged upbringing in Atlanta. He describes the piece as a kind of pavilion ornamented with photographs of some of the families he grew up with in the “bougie” Jack and Jill of America social club, a leadership development organization for Black mothers and children. Atlanta has the largest chapter in the country.
“It’s very much directly engaged with community, it’s very much directly engaged with my upbringing,” said Mitchell of the artwork.
Credit: Tyler Mitchell
Credit: Tyler Mitchell
Jack and Jill is something Mitchell said he has “a lot of fondness for and appreciation for, but also can acknowledge as something that is bound up with the politics of respectability, which I’d like to also let go of in a certain way.”
As in his fashion photography, self-presentation as expressed in those Jack and Jill member portraits becomes a window into identity. It’s “a study of Black, Southern contemporary life,” said Mitchell, “contemporary Jack and Jill life and how people understand themselves and want to show themselves when they are having a portrait made of them.”
After graduation from Westminster, Mitchell studied film at New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts. The artist and art historian Deborah Willis — mother of contemporary artist Hank Willis Thomas — was a mentor. Though firmly entrenched in the photography world, Mitchell still harbors a deep affection for film as evidenced by an Instagram post of him hanging out in the DVD closet of cult art film distributor Criterion Collection and rhapsodizing about high-art filmmakers like Robert Bresson and Yasujirō Ozu. One day, when he’s ready, he’s sure he will return to his formative love of film and make his own.
Mitchell’s Atlanta origins are the backbeat to the highlight reel of an extraordinary career beginning when he became the first Black photographer to shoot a cover of American Vogue. It was September 2018. Mitchell was 23. His subject was Beyoncé. Captured in a towering floral headdress, wearing Saint Laurent couture and subdued makeup, the singer looked years younger and somehow unadorned and unformed. It’s as if Mitchell had cut through the protective layers of celebrity to capture a glimmer of the singer’s early iteration as the daughter of a hairdresser and a Xerox salesman from Houston.
Credit: Tyler Mitchell
Credit: Tyler Mitchell
It was a momentous breakthrough for someone so young, not without its perils, but Mitchell is not inclined to dwell on sudden fame’s downside.
“It was a joy to have that be a springboard into so much of my practice that I’m making now. It was momentous, it was historic. But it was only historic because of who was previously denied before me,” he acknowledged.
“There have been so many artists — Black artists, Black photographers, Black image makers — who have come before me, who are from Atlanta, who are from London or from New York, or from South Africa, who did not get that opportunity,” he said.
Mitchell has since occupied a rarefied space, walking the 2024 Met Gala red carpet looking lithe and elegant, decked out in Prada. His photographs have shown at London’s Gagosian and Saatchi galleries and at the Frieze Masters art fair. At 25 he joined New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery (also home to Atlanta artist Radcliffe Bailey’s work).
He’s shot campaigns for international fashion brands including Marc Jacobs, Givenchy and Ferragamo where he posed a multicultural group of models against Renaissance paintings at Florence’s Uffizi Gallery to suggest a new creative renaissance in identity and influence. For Mitchell, fashion photography is an engagement with history and culture, what he describes as “an interesting sort of Trojan horse into many things … for ideas about beauty and who deserves to belong.”
His work is informed, Mitchell said, by a very different experience from Atlanta as a hip-hop center. He was heavily informed by the city’s parks and natural beauty. The “open green spaces (are) … where some of my formative experiences as a child or a teenager, happened.”
The idea of rest and repose as experienced by his Black subjects in verdant, bucolic settings plays into his interest in the sublime. His images propose a kind of utopia, he has said, a joyous, transportive vision of Black life.
Credit: Tyler Mitchell
Credit: Tyler Mitchell
One work in the show, “Albany, Georgia” (2021), has traces of both the familiar and the exotic with its array of well-dressed multigenerational Black children, teenagers and adults in black and white clothing standing on a sand dune and framed against a sunny blue sky — what he calls a “lightly staged” vision of Black languor and grace. The photo has roots in Mitchell’s fashion photography but also an affinity with filmmaker Julie Dash’s iconic elevation of Black women in “Daughters of the Dust” and the stylized, graphic compositions of people and landscapes by Japanese photographer Shoji Ueda.
“All of my work sort of falls under this umbrella of being about ideas of play and joy against the backdrop of history in that way. And as we know, being from Atlanta and the South becomes a very ripe landscape for that conversation,” said Mitchell.
In another 2021 image on view in the High exhibition, “Ancestors,” Mitchell shot a mother and daughter in their New York brownstone gazing into a mirror above an antique dresser layered with vintage framed photographs of family members. “It was a project where I became fascinated by representations of Black real estate ownership and of Black homeownership and the styling of those interiors,” said Mitchell.
“I’m trying to have a conversation about the centrality of photography to a formation of a Black identity over time. The fact that Black portraiture and family portraiture and vernacular portraits of family members actually does a lot more for us understanding ourselves than we even fully give credit to,” he said.
It’s an ongoing project and one that undergirds “Idyllic Space.”
“This is really my take on the South, which does embrace certain classical notions of the South but also expands on those and rejects other historical ones and leaves ambiguity for a lot of different readings.”
ART PREVIEW
“Tyler Mitchell: idyllic Space.” June 21-Dec. 1. $18.50. High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta. 404-733-4444, high.org.
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