Photographer Tyler Mitchell Is Juggling Two Summer Shows on Two Continents

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.

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.

“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.

“It’s the city I grew up in, the museum that I grew up going to as a kid, so when you have that, it’s a completely different story to tell,” he said. “The High Museum has been a huge, huge, huge goal of mine since I started showing.”

The show also includes what Mitchell calls a sculptural piece consisting of images all produced as part of a conceptual nod to the kind of studio photography pioneered by the Harlem Renaissance artist James Van Der Zee—one that amounts to a sprawling investigation of a slice of the Black community in Atlanta. Working within the context of traditional studio portraiture, Mitchell photographed 25 families involved in the long-standing local chapter of the Jack and Jill of America, the oldest African American–led nonprofit organization in the country. Jack and Jill is a deeply important developmental force for local Black youth, but Mitchell was fascinated by the fact that it still practices outmoded social functions such as debutante and cotillion balls and encouraged members to approach the portrait sittings “presenting themselves to me as they want.”

“So it becomes this kind of strange love letter to the community I grew up in, but also a sort of critique, a sort of critique of respectability and presentation as it relates to Black Southern life, the sort of gentleness and politeness that lays underneath the way we choose to present ourselves,” he said. “And that is all kind of going on underneath the surface of these portraits of those families.”

The show is a big deal not just for Mitchell, but for the High Museum itself. The artist has spent the last few years working with senior curator of modern and contemporary art Michael Rooks to do something groundbreaking: He’ll have the first-ever full photography show installed in the museum’s Stent Wing Special Exhibition galleries.

“Not that anything’s wrong with the photography galleries in the museum, but I often push back against the idea that, as a photographer, we’re sort of relegated to a dark underlit basement,” he said. “Seeing my show in proximity to, let’s just say, a painting show next door, or the European collections next door, could create some interesting conflicts and dialogues.”