Tyler Mitchell was only 23 in 2018, when his portrait of Beyoncé became the first Vogue cover by a Black photographer. Already established, he was suddenly a celebrity. But as was true for others before him, notably Richard Avedon, precocious success in fashion left him hungry for artistic recognition.
To produce “Ghost Images,” his first solo exhibition at Gagosian in New York (a previous Gagosian show was held in London in 2022), Mitchell traveled last year to two barrier islands in his native state of Georgia, including Jekyll Island, where enslaved people were transported by ship as late as 1858. Amid bucolic settings, he posed Black models in individual portraits and staged groups, aiming to evoke not only the beauty of the place but the disquieting past that lurks beneath it.
His most powerful photographs are the least arty. A haunting image of a young man ensnared in a fisherman’s net, with one eye prominently visible through the mesh, lives up to its title, “Ghost Image.” It suggests the horror of entrapment at sea without relying on gimmickry to make the point.
And while “Lamine’s Apparition (After Frederick Sommer)” manipulates the image, it does so adroitly. As the title indicates, Mitchell’s picture reprises a technique employed by Frederick Sommer of printing two negatives on one sheet to unearthly effect. When Sommer composed a portrait of the artist Max Ernst in 1946, the bare-chested Ernst seemed to be transforming into part of a cement wall.
But while Sommer (like Ernst) was a practitioner of Surrealism, Mitchell montages a shirtless young Black man onto a grainy wooden surface to make a different point. Here where slavery flourished, the buildings and soil cry out with the memory of those who suffered. In another skillful use of multiple exposures, “Gwendolyn’s Apparition,” he provides three views of a young woman who is evaporating into invisibility on a tree-lined dirt path.
Mitchell’s project recalls the landscape photographs that Dawoud Bey has made to portray the disorienting new world that enslaved people confronted on arriving in America, and the hazardous journey through forests and across streams that those who escaped were required to navigate as they made their way on the Underground Railroad to freedom in Canada.
Unlike Bey, however, Mitchell doesn’t trust straight photography to convey his meaning. Instead, he relies too often on contrivances that get in the way. “Gulfs Between” is a roughly geometric seascape, with a rectangle of pale blue sky, a thin triangle of deeper blue ocean and a rhomboid of brown sand. In the foreground, a little sailboat and wooden rowboat sit on a pool of seawater. Without further adornment, the children’s toys would resonate strongly with the specter of the fearsome ship that landed here over a century and a half ago. But Mitchell needlessly prints the image on glass and treats the shape of the pond so that its surface becomes a mirror.
There are too many unnecessary distractions in this show. For no apparent reason, the photographs “Old Fears and Old Joys,” of two boys climbing a fence, and “An Embrace,” of two boys hugging or grappling, are printed on mirrors that reflect a viewer’s face and create a visual muddle. “Whirlpool,” a picture of murky green water, has been rendered on cloth and hung loose in a walnut frame so that it resembles a bed covering. Large photographs are occasionally joined with small ones, juxtapositions that fail to enhance one’s appreciation of the individual pictures.
Although no one would deny that we view the world through the veil of historical memory, the printing of photographs on cheesecloth, as Mitchell does in several instances, is a cheesy way of telling us that. His dye-sublimation prints on gauzy fabric soften and blur the images. The message they are sending is too obvious. You see through them in more ways than one.
Mitchell’s three tableaus of models standing on the beach are art-directed like spreads in a fashion magazine. But his individual portraits impressed me more. In “Shine,” a young Black man sitting on scrubby grass is viewed from behind, as the filigreed shadow of foliage on a sunny day forms a dark pattern on his bare back. The color of his denim jeans is picked up by blue pinpoints that highlight his hair, an effect that is created optically by the reflected sunlight.
Denim pants were the standard clothing of enslaved Blacks, who, from Africa, had brought with them the knowledge of how to extract dye from indigo. The shrub became a commercial crop in South Carolina. In the picture, the shadowed outline of pinnate leaves appears to be indigo. For those familiar with that history, “Shine” becomes a thought-provoking meditation on how a legacy casts an enduring shadow.
Tyler Mitchell: Ghost Images
Through April 5, Gagosian, 541 West 24th Street, Manhattan; 212-744-1111; gagosian.com
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