Tyler Mitchell

I aim to visualize what a Black utopia looks like or could look like. People say utopia is never achievable, but I love photography’s possibility of allowing me to dream and make that dream become very real. —Tyler Mitchell 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. Mitchell was born in Atlanta in 1995 and grew up in Marietta, Georgia. He took up the camera at an early age to document local youth culture, and in 2017, he graduated with a BFA in film and television from New York University Tisch School of the Arts, where he studied photography with Deborah Willis. Drawn to the freedom and sensuality captured by photographers such as Larry Clark and Ryan McGinley, Mitchell recognized the homogeneity of those pictured and resolved to create images of Black people that he seeks to visualize as “free, expressive, effortless, and sensitive.” Mitchell achieved global prominence when he photographed Beyoncé for the September 2018 issue of American Vogue , becoming the first Black photographer to shoot the magazine’s cover in its then 126-year history. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery acquired an image from the series the following year. Untitled (Hijab Couture) (2019), from another Vogue feature, pictures Somali-born model Ugbad Abdi wearing a headdress of glossy pink flowers. Mitchell’s photographs of the newly inaugurated Vice President Kamala Harris were commissioned for the cover of Vogue ’s February 2021 issue. Mitchell has also collaborated with the brands Loewe, Louis Vuitton, Ferragamo, JW Anderson, Wales Bonner, and Marc Jacobs. Mitchell’s first solo exhibition, I Can Make You Feel Good at Foam, Amsterdam (2019), was extended under the same title at the International Center of Photography, New York (2020–21), and was accompanied by a monograph published by Prestel. His work is also featured in the group exhibition The New Black Vanguard that was organized by Antwaun Sargent for Aperture in 2019, and traveled through 2023. In 2020, Mitchell was named a Gordon Parks Foundation Fellow, which inspired a series that considers the beauty and intimacy of domestic space and was exhibited as An Imaginative Arrangement of the Things Before Me (2021) at the foundation’s gallery in Pleasantville, New York. In 2022, Gagosian, Davies Street, London, presented Chrysalis , Mitchell’s debut exhibition with the gallery. Featuring photographs of Black men and women at leisure, in lakes and before painted landscape backdrops, scenes of repose and equilibrium such as A Glint of Possibility (2022) are contrasted with images like Flotation (2022), in which figures immersed in mud and turbulent water evoke the need for vigilance and resilience. Also in 2022, Mitchell presented works for London’s Frieze Masters conceived in dialogue with historical landscape motifs—notably, the first time Frieze had commissioned contemporary artwork for the fair. In 2023, the Museum of Art at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia organized Domestic Imaginaries , an exhibition featuring Mitchell’s mixed-media works that later traveled to the North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem, in 2024 . Wish This Was Real, Mitchell’s first exhibition in Germany, was presented at C/O Berlin in 2024 with photographs, videos, and installations from the past decade. The exhibition traveled to four European institutions, with its final stop at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, in 2025–26. Tyler Mitchell: Idyllic Space was organized by Atlanta’s High Museum of Art in 2024. This homecoming project features photographs and video installations inspired by the artist's years growing up in suburban Atlanta and addresses themes of portraiture, landscape, leisure, family, identity, and shared experience.