Gagosian Now Represents Acclaimed Photographer Tyler Mitchell

Gagosian, a gallery with nearly 20 locations around the world, will now represent Tyler Mitchell, one of today’s most acclaimed photographers. The gallery’s next project with Mitchell will be a presentation pairing his images with those of Richard Avedon at Paris Photo next month. A solo show for the artist will follow next spring in New York.

Mitchell is best-known for photographing Beyoncé for the September 2018 cover of American Vogue, marking the first time a Black photographer shot the magazine’s cover. He was 23 at the time. Now 29, Mitchell is one of the youngest artists on Gagosian’s roster.

“Tyler has defined himself as one of the leading photographic voices of his generation,” Antwaun Sargent, a director at Gagosian, told ARTnews in an interview. “We’re always looking at artists who are redefining their medium in some way—and Tyler fits that bill for us. He has ambitious ideas, and he now has an ambitious gallery to support those ideas.”

The gallery first collaborated with Mitchell in 2022, mounting a solo exhibition for the artist in London and supporting his commission for that year’s edition of Frieze Masters. The images shown in the British capital two years ago show young Black people in pastoral or domestic settings, a recurring subject within his oeuvre.

While Mitchell may be better known for his commercial work than the images he shows in museums and galleries, he sees no divide between these two modes of output.

“Images exist in our day-to-day lives, in magazines, in an advertising context, and they can exist in galleries,” Mitchell told ARTnews. “That fluidity is something that I welcome and that I move between and through, [and] it’s been beneficial to my project to always want to move between those spaces at the highest level possible.”

Sargent first met Mitchell nearly a decade ago, around the time that the photographer had graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. “I was fascinated by the way he spoke about what he wanted to do, the way he spoke about the American South, the way he spoke about beauty, his interest and in fashion and pop culture more broadly,” Sargent recalled.

Mitchell added, “Antwaun made it clear that it is a long road. When I think about what this means, it’s really about that long friendship we’ve had, those long dialogues we’ve had about what I want with my work as a photographer in an art conversation.”

The two became friends and frequent collaborators based on their “shared commitment to the themes in his work,” Sargent said. “Over the last few years, we bonded, quite frankly, over the power and possibility of Black beauty, fashion, and telling the stories of Black youth and bringing a level of humanity and tenderness and joy to photography right from a perspective of someone who is in and among the culture.”

In the years since, Sargent has featured Mitchell’s work in a number of his projects, most notably his 2019 exhibition and book The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion, which featured a Mitchell photograph on its cover. Mitchell also showed in the 2021 Gagosian exhibition “Social Works II” in London, organized by Sargent.

Mitchell has also been the subject of a number of institutional solo and two-person exhibitions, including at the International Center of Photography (2020–21), Cleveland Museum of Art (2022), and the Museum of Art at the Savannah College of Art and Design (2023). He currently has a solo show nat the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and a five-venue exhibition in Europe that opens at Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki this week.

Earlier this year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired five images by Mitchell. His work is also represented in the collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Next spring, he will produce images for the catalogue of “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.  

The forthcoming Avedon-Mitchell booth at Paris Photo will feature works by Avedon from the 1960s alongside images made by Mitchell over the last several years, including new works made specifically for the fair. That outing builds upon another previous Gagosian project, “Avedon 100,” a 2023 exhibition which marked the 100th anniversary of the photographer’s birth by inviting more than 150 people—from Hilton Als to Iman to Nicola Erni to Chloë Sevigny—to select an Avedon image. For that show, Mitchell selected a 1946 photograph Avedon took in a mirror showing himself and James Baldwin.

“I see Avedon as someone who essentially evolved from celebrity portraitist and fashion photographer into a full-blown, socially minded artists,” Mitchell said. “That, for me, is what this co-presentation is exploring: how we both do that, how he moved through these spaces in the 20th century, and how I’m moving now through these spaces now.”

“Having that intergenerational conversation is only possible at this gallery because these two artists are represented here,” Sargent said.

Sargent added that Gagosian’s roster already includes some of the “defining photographic artists of our time,” like Avedon, Deana Lawson, Nan Goldin, and Roe Ethridge, and he sees Mitchell as “working in that lineage.”

He added, “No one is doing what he is doing. He’s carved out of his own space and contemporary art and photography.”