Tyler Mitchell’s Art-Historical Mood Board

Visually, Mitchell’s images are sumptuous, stylish, and seductive, channelling the old-school photographic glamour epitomized by Richard Avedon, one of Mitchell’s idols. Conceptually, Mitchell’s work has its roots in his undergraduate education at N.Y.U. A mentor there was the artist and photographic historian Deborah Willis, whose scholarly excavations of photographs of Black beauty, stretching back to the nineteenth century, furnished Mitchell with a framework for his own art. By the time he made his Vogue cover, he had settled into a signature approach: harking back to Willis’s archive, and to the work of the photographer Kwame Brathwaite, a pioneer of the Black Is Beautiful movement, Mitchell committed to the enshrinement of Black splendor. Even in his personal work, such as the recent series “Ghost Images,” a gothically tinged exploration of the slave history of Georgia’s Sea islands, his subjects are lithe and comely, and the men are often photographed shirtless, giving some of the work a distinctly erotic air. During a recent conversation at his studio, in Brooklyn, Mitchell told me that he sees this style, in part, as a strategic appeal to the viewer’s attention. “I’ve always thought about beauty and photography as a hook to draw in the viewer, to talk about all sorts of things, whether it be identity, or memory, or presence, or history, or landscape,” he said.

“Chrysalis,” 2022.

“Simply Fragile,” 2022.

Mitchell often conjures a vision of what he calls “Black utopia,” where his subjects lounge and play in a manner that mirrors his adolescent days in Georgia, which were spent skateboarding with friends, swimming in a pond near his parents’ suburban home, and taking solitary sojourns into nature. In one image—a favorite of mine—a man lies on an expanse of sand, cradling a smiling child, whose drool is pooling on the man’s shirtless chest. Many pictures feature Black subjects swimming or playing in water, a subtle reclamation of a leisure activity that has historically excluded some Black Americans, and a nod to a dark history of the Middle Passage. As idyllic as Mitchell’s scenes appear, they leave you wrestling with the uncomfortable reasons why they nevertheless feel so bracingly novel. In one image, a multi-generational crew is arrayed on the banks of a river, in a tableau that recalls Seurat’s Seine-side “La Grande Jatte”; to underline the comparison, one of the figures is painting en plein air.