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.

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.