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.
