‘I hope my output will deepen and complicate’: In the wake of Wish This Was Real opening at the MEP, the photographer reflects on the past decade’s work and anticipates his future artistic trajectory
There’s a film Tyler Mitchell made in 2015, while still a student at Tisch School Of The Arts, that foreshadowed much of the groundbreaking work the Atlanta-born artist was on the verge of creating. The dreamlike footage captures a group of young Black men playing with water guns and candy-hued plastic chains, merging scenes of innocence with symbols of political unrest in America. Shot with the vivid panache of a music video, rather than the gestural painterliness of his work today, the early contours of the world that would establish Mitchell as one of the most important image-makers of our time are, however, already there. There’s gentleness, beauty and, most of all, an entangling of the realities of contemporary Black life with dreams of paradise.
A decade on, that early video has become something of a landmark for Mitchell. Its title, Wish This Was Real, anchors both his second Aperture-published book, arriving this autumn, and a sprawling exhibition surveying ten years of his work. The show has already travelled through Helsinki, Lausanne, and Berlin, and now Wish This Was Real arrives in Paris, opening yesterday (15 October 2025) at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie. “The phrase began to encapsulate many of the tensions at play in my practice,” he tells Dazed. “The space between documenting reality and meticulously staging it, between engaging real human relationships and crafting imagined worlds. It also speaks to a kind of yearning that runs through the work: a desire for a tender vision of Black life.”
The decade the exhibition spans has been an eventful one. Mitchell, who turns 30 this year, grew up in suburban Atlanta and made his start shooting friends skateboarding as a teenager. Bringing the spirit of togetherness from skate culture to his film degree in New York, he developed a visual language that told Black stories with a lyrical tenderness and wonder, a vision that quickly gained the attention of fashion brands and magazines like i-D and Dazed. By the age of 23, he had made history as the first African American photographer to shoot a Vogue cover (the Beyoncé-fronted 2018 September issue remains one of the most fabled in the magazine’s 130-year-long history).
While others might have plateaued after such a meteoric rise, Mitchell’s work has only grown more beautiful and intellectually rich. His first major solo exhibition, I Can Make You Feel Good, opened at Foam Amsterdam just months before the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, striking notes of poignancy with its soft, utopian visions of Black life. Since then, he’s continued to define a new era of fashion image-making while filling institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the National Portrait Gallery with his work.
This year marked another milestone: his representation by global heavyweight Gagosian, under which he’s already staged two shows – Ghost Images, exploring Southern Gothic themes through shadowy scenes of seaside leisure, and Portrait of the Modern Dandy, recently on view in London’s Burlington Arcade (based on his images for the Met’s Superfine: Tailoring Black Style exhibition). At the end of a remarkable decade – and in the midst of an equally defining year – Mitchell stands irrefutably as one of America’s most powerful visual storytellers.
Though Wish This Was Real has already made its rounds of European galleries, this display in Paris marks one important point of difference. Mitchell’s work is shown in tandem with a retrospective of Edward Weston’s defining black-and-white photography. Although a century apart, there are subtle echoes and tensions between their work, with both offering up reactions to a changing America – Weston, with the sculptural, modernist style he pioneered in the mid-century, and Mitchell, with his luminous, history-refracted visions of Black life. “Weston is a photographic great, so in that sense it’s a pleasure to share space with him,” says Mitchell. “But I can’t claim to have drawn much inspiration from his work directly.”
As an American from the South, many of the social tensions, dynamics, and contradictions that have defined that region and, in many ways, the country itself are woven into my work. In that sense, I think the images only become more prescient over time – Tyler Mitchell
While the MEP is celebrating the two artists together, the shows are very much separate. Tracing a journey through Mitchell's dynamic practice across photography, video, and sculpture, his display unfolds across a series of rooms that are arranged thematically rather than chronologically. Beginning with the 2015 video from which the exhibition takes its title, the artist and curator Brendan Embser identified three key “recurring fixations” in Mitchell’s work – freedom, paradise and family. “We set out to craft a show that surveys the ideas that have remained constant throughout my practice,” he says. “There’s the social relationships at the heart of portraiture and its power to affirm freedom and presence; the pastoral and my ongoing engagement with nature as an idea that runs through art history; and finally, the enduring power of visualising the Black family unit.”
Inside these rooms, the most affecting images reveal Mitchell’s gift for uncovering the extraordinary in the everyday. In Ancestors (2021), a young woman and her mother gaze into a mirror while photographs of their relatives on the wall behind them are reflected back, offering a quiet meditation on generational ties. Elsewhere, sites of collective trauma are reimagined as places of rest and reprieve, such as in the sun-dappled Riverside Scene, which captures a family by a Georgia riverbank in a composition recalling Georges Seurat’s 1880s painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Then there’s Mitchell’s most recent works, which build upon a lineage of greats like James Van Der Zee in fabric-veiled walnut frames, beneath which are gathered warmly-posed scenes of Southern community and family.
While the show traces a journey through imagined worlds of leisure and joy, over the decade it surveys, the America outside Mitchell’s frames has fractured into ever-deepening divides. The photographer is, of course, aware of this. “The work really begins from my autobiography, which I’ve always been open about,” he says. “As an American from the South, many of the social tensions, dynamics, and contradictions that have defined that region and, in many ways, the country itself are woven into my work. In that sense, I think the images only become more prescient over time.”
It’s sobering to recognise how America, and the world at large, seems to move two steps forward and one step back – Tyler Mitchell
Putting the show together, he says, has offered an opportunity to reflect on what it means to exist in America at this moment. “It’s sobering to recognise how America, and the world at large, seems to move two steps forward and one step back,” he says. “History has a way of looping back on itself, and so any art that engages seriously and intellectually with the past, mine included, I like to think remains relevant to the present.” Showing the work outside the States, to European audiences, has added layers of perspective too. “I’m curious how a French audience will regard the work,“ he says. “I’ve seen it now in Germany, Finland, and Switzerland. So let’s just see. Of course, I hope they will come away with a widened imagination of the possibilities, urgency, and importance of photography at this moment.”
On a more personal level, the show marks the closing of an adrealised, sky-rocketing chapter of Mitchell’s own youth as he steps into his 30s. “It definitely feels like I’m experiencing a sort of rebirth which has yet to become clear, even to myself, which is both exciting and nerve-wracking,” he says. “Doing this show and my book with Aperture has made me confront ten years of work and experimentation in photography, much of which I’m proud of, but which I now have to humbly leave behind. Inevitably, this new decade, marked by turning 30, has to be entirely different from the ten years that preceded it,” he says. “My palette and exposure are widening, my tastes are sharpening, and I think – or at least I hope – my output will deepen and complicate.”
Tyler Mitchell’s Wish This Was Real is running at the MEP in Paris until 25 January 2026.