You should know who Tyler Mitchell is

Tyler Mitchell was the first African-American photographer to take the prestigious September cover of Vogue in 2018, immortalizing Beyoncé (who had specially chosen it for the shooting) in what remains one of the most iconic covers of fashion magazines in recent years.

From that point on, the career of the then 23-year-old Mitchell literally exploded: the following year one of his Beyoncé portraits was purchased and exhibited at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, his work ended up on the cover of "The Black New Vanguard”, the encyclopedic book by Antwuan Sargent, then the partnerships with Marc Jacobs and Comme des Garcons came, up to the collaboration with Jonathan Anderson for JW Anderson's FW19 campaign, now repeated for the SS20. The shots on stilts in the open countryside of the FW19 have turned into images of a suburban ideal. As Anderson had said to i-D at the launch of the FW19: "I don't think campaigns are ever just a person's vision, but Tyler really had an idea of ​​what he wanted and we did it."

The images of the campaign convey all of Mitchell's aesthetic, a vision bringing him to his first solo show "I Can Make You Feel Good", inaugurated in January at the International Center of Photography in New York. "It's a literal statement for what the show is trying to do," Mitchell told Artnet, " I don't really address the public of the fine arts directly. I address a wider audience while I use the institution as a way to build a more critical dialogue." Mitchell is part of that generation of photographers who are trying to redefine the aesthetic canons of the world of photography and fashion, through the dissemination of images that favor the sense of representation of African Americans in fashion magazines and museums.

«Tyler comes from a generation of artists who don't see the same boundaries of the past» Isolde Brielmaier, the show's curator, has always told Artnet. "They are not burdened by the same conceptual, aesthetic and gender definitions that artists have traditionally had to deal with. This is one of the reasons why I was attracted to his work because he is so fluid ». Tyler Mitchell and his work derive from the urban culture in which he grew up: his first major work was a cover story of The Fader with Kevin Abstract, leader of BROCKHAMPTON. Mitchell is the best expression of a generation of black artists who grew up on Tumblr and Instagram, and who made the disintermediation offered by social networks the weapon to break all barriers and get to Vogue or JW Anderson's campaigns.