Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real

(Paperback)

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The definitive early career survey of one of the most compelling photographers of his generation.

Tyler Mitchell's photography is animated by dreams of paradise and joy against the backdrop of history. Since his rise to prominence in the worlds of photography and fashion, Mitchell creates images of beauty, utopia, and the American landscape that expand the imaginary of Blackness in the twenty-first century. Wish This Was Real is the definitive early career survey of Mitchell's work, offering a comprehensive look into the subjects animating his artistic practice, from his color-drenched photography in Cuba and genre-bending portraits made in the United States and West Africa to his photographs printed on diaphanous fabrics and sculptures that reference Black intellectual history. By offering new perspectives on his long-standing themes of self-determination and the extraordinary radiance of the everyday, Wish This Was Real shows how portraiture can be rooted in a collective past while evoking imagined futures.

Author Bio

Tyler Mitchell (born in Atlanta, 1995) is a Brooklyn-based artist, photographer, and filmmaker. He received a BA in film and television from New York University Tisch School of the Arts in 2017. Mitchells work is held in private and public collections and has been published widely in magazines, including Aperture, Dazed, i-D, Interview, M le magazine du Monde, Vanity Fair, American and British Vogue, W, WSJ, and Zeit Magazin. In 2018, Mitchell was commissioned to photograph Beyonc for American Vogue, making history, at the age of twenty-three, as the first Black photographer to shoot the magazines cover. His work is in numerous private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem; Brooklyn Museum; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and National Portrait Gallery, London. Mitchells first solo exhibition, I Can Make You Feel Good (2019), was presentedat Foam, Amsterdam, and at the International Center of Photography, New York. His solo exhibition Wish This Was Real (2024) opened at C/O Berlin and travels to museums in Helsinki; Lausanne, Switzerland; Paris; and Vienna through 2026. Anna Wintour is the editor in chief of Vogue and the global chief content officer of Cond Nast. Sophie Cavoulacos is associate curator in the Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Rashid Johnson is an artist based in New York. His solo exhibition A Poem for Deep Thinkers will be presented by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2025. Robin Coste Lewis is a poet and author of Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015), which won the National Book Award for Poetry, and To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (2022). Drew Sawyer is an art historian and the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Rachel Tashjian is a fashion writer for the Washington Post. Salamishah Tillet is a professor of African American studies and creative writing at Rutgers UniversityNewark and a contributing critic at large for the New York Times. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2022.