The New Yorker:

The thirty-year-old star photographer became famous for his reference-rich images of Black beauty, but his strongest work suggests a tender eye for imperfection.

By Chris Wiley

Tyler Mitchell, the thirty-year-old photography phenom, has enjoyed a rocket-fuelled rise in the fashion and art worlds since graduating from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts less than a decade ago. In 2018, he became the first Black photographer to shoot a cover for Vogue, capturing Beyoncé in a frilly white prairie dress with an elaborate headpiece that simultaneously recalled Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s fantastical paintings, Frida Kahlo’s elaborate flower crowns, and Carmen Miranda’s fruit-basket hats. He has since done campaigns for fashion houses including Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, Ferragamo, Balenciaga, Loewe, and Wales Bonner, and photographed for the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent exhibition “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” He has had two solo exhibitions at the Gagosian gallery, which now represents him, and has been the subject of a handful of museum shows in the United States and Europe, including “Wish This Was Real,” currently on view at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, in Paris. A hefty, handsome book of the same name, released recently by Aperture, features a diverse, almost absurdly heavy-hitting list of contributors including Anna Wintour, Rashid Johnson, and Drew Sawyer, the co-curator of the upcoming Whitney Biennial. “How lucky we all are,” Wintour writes in her essay, “to witness such a wizard at work.”

Go to link