Tyler Mitchell is an Atlanta born and raised skateboarder turned photographer-filmmaker. He taught himself the art of both still and moving pictures after becoming enamored with a friend’s DSLR camera.
Mitchell’s work is diversified, and he stands at the intersection of fashion, music, and conceptual photography and filmmaking. He is approaching his senior year at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts as a Film and TV major.
As a photographer, he’s shared work with platforms like Dazed Digital, Vice, Wonderland Magazine, Complex, and more. In video, he’s directed projects for Abra, Kevin Abstract, and other burgeoning musicians of the digital generation. In 2015 he released his first photo book El Paquete, a publication that emerged from a month-long trip spent shooting architecture and skating in Havana, Cuba. The book is currently stocked at Dashwood Books in New York City and has attracted a wide audience of admirers and fellow creatives alike.
The works are rich in color, playful in composition, but have a bewitching seriousness and intimacy to them, which exhibits just how in touch Mitchell is with his subjects of choice, particularly in regards to his contemporaries. Each of his compositions showcases a pure, arresting setting that often elegantly toes the line between richness of detail and minimalism. The artist claims his visual consistency is rooted in his young adulthood. About his style’s origin, Mitchell confesses “in high school I was always jealous of what the picture perfect cheerleaders had – their social autonomy, their beauty and all their drama.” Humorously describing himself as “a socially awkward black kid who refused the molds of being an athlete, a rapper, or a nerd,” Mitchell aims to reflect these characteristics in making his work as bright, coloristically thematic and, in his own words, as “beautifully problematic” as possible. Selected for the Dazed 100 list of people who will shape culture in 2016, Mitchell continues to do so by way of editorial campaigns, backstage photography at concerts and fashion shows, and more experimental art photography. You can further explore the world of Tyler Mitchell by way of creations through his website, his Instagram, or his twitter.
