Tyler Mitchell has been making art at a breakneck pace since 2018, when he photographed Beyoncé for Vogue and became the first Black photographer to lens the cover. He joined the roster of Jack Shainman in 2020 and launched two New York exhibitions across its two Chelsea galleries in 2021. His early shows generated a great amount of excitement about the entire medium of photography, which has in recent years taken a back seat in white cubes and auction houses to painting—especially because Mitchell’s images are brimming with emotion, bursting out of the frames.
Tyler Mitchell.
And then in late 2022, Mitchell had a show at the Gagosian empire’s outpost on Davies Street in London’s Mayfair, opening in the primo slot during Frieze. The rollicking first-night celebration for his new series of diptychs spilled out into the streets, and guests included artists such as Amy Sherald and Lauren Halsey, then British Vogue editor Edward Enninful, and CNN fixture Christiane Amanpour. By the time guests arrived at the dinner at a posh members club, the works had all sold.
But even with that brisk ascent, the summer of 2024 is turning out to be a landmark season for the 29-year-old.
“We’re going to be on two continents in the same month and installing and opening big shows—and let’s hope that we survive to the end,” Mitchell told me during a brief moment of calm before the summer began. “I’m just excited to see the reactions to the work and to see how it might move people. And it feels like an introduction of who I am.”
Earlier this month a show at the German photography and visual media institution C/O Berlin officially became Mitchell’s first solo outing in the country—over 3,000 people came through the gallery’s home within what was previously the Amerika Haus during the opening on June 1. Mitchell’s “Wish This Was Real” includes work from 2015 to now, but there’s also a section of curated work by Mitchell’s friends and contemporaries, including Rashid Johnson, Garrett Bradley, Grace Wales Bonner, and Loretta Pettway Bennett of the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers.
Tyler Mitchell.
“I wanted to put my work in proximity of other practitioners, for a German audience, to convey the lineage of not only Black image makers and photographers, but Black artists and the multiple modes of expression that are possible around contemporary ideas of Black life,” he said.
But especially close to Mitchell’s heart is the show “Tyler Mitchell: Idyllic Space,” opening this week at the High Museum of Art in his native Atlanta—a show that will focus on how, even though his studio’s in New York, the ethos of his image making is rooted in the American South.