Tyler Mitchell @ Musée Européen de la Photographie

Tyler Mitchell, Ancestors, 2021

I was excited to see Tyler Mitchell's exhibition at the Musée Européen de la Photographie. Mitchell is a young photographer who has enjoyed a meteoric rise to renown, thanks in large part by a photograph of Beyoncé for the cover of Vogue. The work on exhibition in Paris ranges from film, through portrait photographs and landscapes, to what I will call, memory works in which he places old family photographs on mirrors. These photographs are  particularly sophisticated in their creation of reflective visions that simultaneously look back to Mitchell's own history and draw the present viewer into this history. 

Tyler Mitchell, Riverside Scene, 2021

There is a lot of staging in Mitchell's photographs: it is possible to see that he has spent a long time putting together the mise-en-scène of the image, creating carefully crafted photographs made to look realist. In particular, the portrait paintings with their curtains and backgrounds, poses and performances display the process. The people's poses are often playful and relaxed, with no sense of threat or indication of oppression or a violent history. Of course, this is the point; the figures have taken back the centre of the frame, the look at the viewer, and the narrative told by an image. They are now the protagonists of their own story where once African Americans were excluded from history. The landscape photographs are also powerful because of their appropriation of the pastoral landscape format, inserting African Americans into a space that is not, as Manet reminded us over a century ago, divorced from history as painters such as Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin would have us believe.

Tyler Mitchell, Wish This Were Real, 
Installation

Some of the most powerful photographs were those in which he uses mirrors. A man swimming in a local waterhole reflects a staged portrait of two men that hangs on an opposite wall, one sitting, the other seemingly smoothing down the backgroumnd. Next to the reflected portrait, what looks like a waterlogged object in a small black and white photograph reminds the viewer that these same waters were used for disposing of bodies and erasing traces of violence against the likes of the men in the larger photograph. The man's liberty to swim has been hard won over the course of history. In another photograph, two women, perhaps mother and daughter fix their hair in a mirror, a mantlepiece filled with old photographs of ancestors sits in the foreground. The photograph suggests that the stories of generations are woven into the daily rituals and routines in the present. Metaphorically, the photograph also reminds us that the people remembered on the mantelpiece are always in the foreground of daily life. 

Tyler Mitchell, Untitled. Blue Laundry Line, 2019

Ultimately, while I enjoyed seeing this young photographer searching for ways to represent his people with dignity, joy, and grace, the narrative was a familiar one, putting African Americans into the position so long assumed by white people. Taylor's intention is noble, but the message is not new. With his exploration of different genres, styles, and photographic techniques, the exhibition shows that Mitchell is still searching for his own visual language. The ancestor photographs were lovely, the landscapes interesting with their layers of art history, and the portrait-style works were colourful and bright. So, in short, Mitchell has a promising future, and it will be interesting to see where his aesthetic settles. 

Images copyright the artist and Gagosian