Tyler Mitchell is an American photographer born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1995. His strikingly beautiful images straddle fine art and fashion and his work is adored by curators, collectors and magazine editors.
Mr Mitchell turned to photography and film as a teenager; he took up skateboarding and began making montage videos of other skaters. He later enrolled in New York University's film and television programme, where he decided to focus on photography. "I saw it as a way I could quickly tell visual stories and speak to culture without waiting for a larger budget or crew," he has said.
He credits black artists and photographers such as Gordon Parks, Roy DeCarava and Carrie Mae Weems as influences. A visit to Cuba at the age of 20 proved formative, allowing him to develop what Emily Bierman, global head of prints and photographs at Sotheby's, describes as a "hyper-saturated" aesthetic.
In 2018 Mr Mitchell became the first black photographer to shoot a cover in Vogue's 126-year history, depicting Beyoncé in a floral head-dress. He has since photographed Kamala Harris for Vogue; his work has been acquired by Sir Elton John and David Furnish and displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; and he has shot the catalogue for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's fashion exhibition, "Superfine: Tailoring Black Style".
Textiles are a recurring motif in his work—billowing sheets, patchworked denim, fishing nets. His photographs are "lightly staged": he gathers groups of models, dresses them, places them in a specific location and then lets the scene play out. His subjects are people of colour; he has described his artistic world as something like a "black utopia".
In October 2025 "Riverside Scene from Dreaming in Real Time", a large image reminiscent of a painting by Georges Seurat, sold for $54,180 at auction—double the estimate and a record for his work. In 2024 Gagosian, the contemporary-art gallery, began representing him. In 2025 the Aperture Foundation—which typically celebrates artists to acknowledge decades of work—honoured Mr Mitchell at the age of 30. A travelling early-career survey, "Wish This Was Real", has been on display at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris.
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