Book Review Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real

Perhaps no other photographer of his generation has experienced a rise as meteoric as Mitchell’s. Born in Atlanta and now working between New York, Europe, and West Africa, he became the youngest photographer to shoot a Vogue cover (featuring Beyoncé) in 2018.

Since then, he has developed a practice that is both creative and emotionally resonant, crafting images suffused with light and movement, dreams of paradise and joy unfolding against histories that are often unseen, yet palpably present. Photography, in his hands, is rarely a simple transcription of reality.

Each frame is a considered construction, a layering of subject, place, and light that transforms the familiar into something both utopian and intimate. Whether portraits of friends, collaborators, or strangers, or staged tableaux that blend sculptural form and fabric, Mitchell’s work resists the notion of passive observation. The viewer is invited not simply to look, but to feel, to inhabit the world he has imagined.

Regardless of the person before his lens, he renders them with an unmistakable sensitivity: bodies bathed in sun, surrounded by open sky or enveloped in fabric, their gestures gentle, almost contemplative. There is an intimacy here that resists spectacle, an invitation into a moment of ease, of vulnerability, of self-possession. In Mitchell’s world, every person is afforded the same grace, the same quiet dignity, the same luminous space to simply be.

Central to Mitchell’s practice is his painterly command of color. Saturated yet soft, his palettes feel less like documentation and more like atmosphere, hues that breathe, that wrap themselves around his subjects with an almost tactile warmth. These chromatic choices are never arbitrary; they suggest a broad lineage of visual references, from the utopian sensibilities of early American color photography to the iconography of Black Southern vernacular culture, Caribbean portrait studios, and the cinematic poise reminiscent of directors such as Julie Dash. Yet Mitchell’s visual language remains distinctly his own.

Mitchell’s images also gesture toward the rich lineage of West African studio portraiture, most notably the staged elegance of Malian masters like Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé. Though his settings are often outdoors rather than in the studio, the influence is evident in his use of patterned fabrics, sculptural poses, and the gentle performativity of those he portrays. These references are not mere stylistic quotations; they are part of a broader dialogue with a visual tradition that celebrated Black self-fashioning long before it entered the Western canon. Mitchell extends that legacy into the twenty-first century, placing his subjects—friends, models, public figures—within spaces of beauty and agency.

A comprehensive survey of his young, yet prolific career thus far, the book’s curation spans portraits, landscapes, and experimental works from locations across the United States, Europe, and West Africa. Here, Blackness is rendered with an expansiveness that is rare in photography, neither constrained by stereotype nor confined to documentation. Yet the work is never merely celebratory. Mitchell’s images acknowledge the weight of history, of cultural inheritance, while insisting on the right to imagine otherwise, asking us to consider what a photographic archive of joy, freedom, and possibility might look like.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Wish This Was Real is its insistence on imagination as a mode of survival. Photography, for Mitchell, is not only a means of documentation, but a method of inhabiting possibility, of giving form to futures that do not yet exist. In that sense, these images, no matter how deeply personal, resonate far beyond their frames. They are both testament and invitation, a record of a world seen and a world dreamed.

All Images © Tyler Mitchell, Courtesy of Gagosian

Wish This Was Real is published by Aperture and is available here.