Images Across the Veil: Tyler Mitchell
Tyler Mitchell, Cumberland Island Tableau, 2024. Archival pigment print, 63 x 78 inches (160 x 198.3 cm). Edition of 3 + 2 AP. © Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Printed on mirrors and diaphanous swaths of fabric, the photographs in Tyler Mitchell’s Ghost Images, on view at Gagosian, play with dimensionality, working to visualize specters on the edge of existence, “[capturing] presences that are unseen but deeply felt.” Known for his romantic envisaging of Black life and subjects, the images Mitchell creates are luminescent.
Mitchell has previously eschewed didactic analyses of his work, maintaining that as a visual medium, his photography should first and foremost be experienced viscerally. Through his practice, Mitchell tries to make images that supersede the baggage we bring as viewers, giving us the opportunity to leave behind our own associations and instead focus on the image itself. This is not to say that Mitchell argues against the political. Instead, he opens the conversation to a more nuanced sense of what the political looks like. Because Black existence is often politicized, these beautiful, dignified images that resist easy interpretation or reduction are in and of themselves a powerful act of resistance.
Mitchell’s photographs are mesmerizing. By nature, photography as a medium is always engaging with the distortion of time, caught between the eternal and ephemeral, as it freezes and preserves a fraction of a second. Mitchell’s printing methods amplify the themes of memory and presence that permeate the exhibition. In some photographs, memory manifests more obviously than in others. Mitchell’s use of double exposure in Gwendolyn’s Apparition and Convivial Conversation leaves the imprints of motion. In others, deftly deployed abstraction and obfuscation harmonize with light in tactile compositions. In his complex mastery of the photographic medium, Mitchell collapses the space between the sitter and the viewer. Even in his play with opacity, with his subjects fading in and out of backdrops as in Lamine’s Apparition (After Frederick Sommer) and The General (Adbou’s Apparition), the presence of the individuals he photographs is undeniable.
Tyler Mitchell, Lamine's Apparition (After Frederick Sommer), 2024. Gelatin silver print, 40 x 50 inches (101.6 x 127 cm). Edition of 3 + 2 AP. © Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
An Embrace extends past the frame, drawing us into the image as we are reflected back at ourselves. It is impossibly intimate—the man’s gaze, the tenderness of his embrace with his companion. As we hold eye contact, it is almost as if we become one of Mitchell’s apparitions. The question of how photography can be used to push the boundaries of our perception leads to a more existential conversation of what is solid versus what is ephemeral.
In the exhibition materials, Mitchell quotes Clarence John Laughlin: “And this beauty carries within itself the intimation that the past can never die because it still exists, intact, on some other plane of time, around which we cannot see directly.” The idea, and its manifestation in Mitchell’s images, is metaphysical, but I think of physics. The laws of conservation of energy and matter say that in closed systems, energy and matter are neither created nor destroyed, simply transformed. Not being a physicist, I can’t tell you whether the universe is a closed system or not, but for argument’s sake, let’s say that it is. The past swirls around us, its energy having dissipated and reconfigured itself in an infinite exchange. The thought is simultaneously comforting and haunting, that when we are broken down into the atoms of which we are composed, our energetic bodies transcend form.
Tyler Mitchell, Convivial Conversation, 2024. Dye-sublimation print on fabric, walnut artist's frame, 64 1/2 x 47 1/2 x 4 inches (163.8 x 120.7 x 10.2 cm). © Tyler Mitchell. Photo: Jackie Furtado. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
In the final room of the exhibition, viewers find Cumberland Island Tableau. The photograph features six figures atop and against the backdrop of a dune. The image itself is one of tranquility, but having grown up on the dunes of Cape Cod, I can’t help but think of erosion, climate change, and the transience of this environment. This might not be the unseen presence Mitchell aims to illuminate, but nonetheless, it reminds me that we are surrounded by the immaterial and that the weight of memory will always find a way of making itself known.
Tyler Mitchell: Ghost Images is on view at Gagosian, New York, from February 27th to April 5th, 2025.
