A fter living in New York City for more than a decade, photographer Tyler Mitchell, 29, was not expecting his return to his native Atlanta last year to be an emotional one. After all, in the intervening years, the Museum of Modern Art had acquired his work, American Vogue had commissioned him as its first Black cover photographer and he had created campaigns for LVMH and Kering. He was in Atlanta to install his show at the High Museum of Art, an institution he dubs the MoMA of his hometown. Yet “there was a lot of angst,” he says.
“It was hugely emotional for me,” says Mitchell. “I really felt growing up there that I was in a microcosm. There were a lot of parts of myself that felt invisible, and there was a lot of weight there for me, especially through the lens of race. You do feel that everywhere in Atlanta, Georgia, and it is baked into the history of the place, despite its vibrancy.”
Mitchell grew up in Marietta, an Atlanta suburb, where local attractions include a “Gone With the Wind” museum, a Six Flags White Water theme park and a Confederate military cemetery. His mother and father both worked in the finance world—his father as a consultant and his mother as a conference planner—but they encouraged their only child’s interest in art by buying him a camera in ninth grade. Mitchell was an avid fan of skate culture and taught himself from YouTube, soon shooting his own skate images and short films. He attended NYU’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, where photographer and professor Deborah Willis began mentoring him.
Though art-world insiders, musicians and fashion creatives had already taken note of his work via Instagram and exhibitions, Mitchell’s public big break was in 2018, when Vogue commissioned him to shoot Beyoncé. He was just 23, and he captured the megastar in natural splendor, adorned with a floral headdress. Since then, he’s shot figures like Kamala Harris, Lily-Rose Depp and Sandra Hüller for the covers of Vogue and W. He’s also created Old Masters-style tableaux for Ferragamo, conjured Dutch-still-life-meets-ikebana for Loewe and brought concepts of a playful boyhood to life for Louis Vuitton. At the same time, Mitchell has mounted exhibitions at venerated institutions, including the International Center of Photography, C/O Berlin, Amsterdam’s Foam Fotografiemuseum and The Gordon Parks Foundation. This month, he opens a show of new photographs at Gagosian in New York, his first in the city since joining the gallery last fall.
“People sometimes are like, ‘Are [clients] just paying you to make your artwork? Where’s the line here?’” Mitchell says. “I think that’s a good thing.” He also looks to a wide breadth of canonical inspiration, including photographers Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson and Francesca Woodman, and his role models Deborah Willis and Carrie Mae Weems.
“Tyler is forging a new path,” says Maria L. Kelly, assistant curator at the High Museum of Art, who worked with Mitchell on his show there last year, “Idyllic Space.” “The art world often divides fashion and commercial work into one section, while personal photography is [considered] fine art. He’s breaking down those boundaries. It’s secondary where his work ends up—it’s the work that’s the most important.”
The Gagosian show, titled “Ghost Images,” was primarily created while Mitchell worked on the High Museum exhibition in Atlanta. It was the first extended period that Mitchell, who lives in Brooklyn, had spent in the city since leaving for NYU.
“Can photography capture memory?” he says. “That was the question I was really asking myself a lot in making these. I have memories of Georgia more than I do actual experiences in the last decade, and so in making work there, I’m drawing out my own personal lived histories and wider Black cultural histories.”
Capturing the Black figure in this familiar landscape became one of Mitchell’s aims. He shot in recognizable locations, such as the dunes of Cumberland Island, in the manner of impressionism’s grand tableaux. His portraits include a figure wrapped in a net, seemingly frozen, under trees dripping with Spanish moss.
“I think somehow the place became very sharp and clear and resonant for me. Having had distance,” he was able to recognize, he says, “how it shaped me, how the style of Atlanta shaped me, how the particularities of the Black core of the city, the focus on Black culture and Black artistic production has always been in the city, even when I didn’t quite see it growing up there.”
“I love the way that Tyler is often paying tribute to his youth, the way he was brought up in Atlanta and the memories that he has from experimenting as a teenage skateboarder—and thinking through what the South and what Atlanta specifically means,” says curator and Aperture editor Brendan Embser, who first met Mitchell as a 22-year-old entrant to the Aperture Foundation’s open-submission exhibition. The two also collaborated on a recent exhibition that is currently making its way through Europe, “Wish This Was Real.” (The accompanying book will be published by Aperture this fall.)
“Tyler has this light touch and naturalness,” says Embser. “It’s so clear that the subjects that he photographs really enjoy collaborating with him and bring something special of themselves to work. He is thinking about Black leisure and joy in natural spaces.”
Though Mitchell uses his iPhone as much as any other 29-year-old on social media, he wanted to experiment with new photographic methods for this show. “I want to be slippery and confident in moving between styles,” he says.
He collaborated on “Ghost Images” with Gagosian’s director Antwaun Sargent, whom he also met around the time he entered the Aperture Foundation open call. These new works show Mitchell playing with 20th-century surrealist techniques such as printing on fabric and mirrors or creating double exposures, as with his portrait of a young man that pays homage to photographer Frederick Sommer. Mitchell says the material qualities of fabric and its drape are especially important to him. He finds inspiration in the poetry of Toni Morrison or Robin Coste Lewis as much as Jonathan Anderson’s Spring/Summer 2025 runway show for Loewe, which featured exaggerated crinolines.
He also mentions Andy Warhol. “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art,” said the artist who, more than any other figure, eradicated the border between art and commerce with his paintings and screen prints of dollar signs, car crashes and movie stars. Decades later, Mitchell aims to do the same with photography.
“My superpower has been in my ability to make those lines even more extremely blurry,” says Mitchell—questioning what is journalism, what is art and what is a fashion image. “As we get further and further away from reality and deeper and deeper involved with the mediated image as a way of understanding reality, we have to embrace that complication in art.”
“Ghost Images” opens on February 27 at Gagosian, 541 West 24th Street, New York.
