A 27-year-old photographer from Atlanta, Georgia, Tyler Mitchell is thought of as the trailblazer of the Black utopic vision in modern photography. His images depict Black people partaking in jovial activities like hula hooping, running kites, or swinging on swing sets. Black people doing these things, however, is not what is so radical, it is the act of capturing it in an image and sharing that image amidst the inundation of mass media today. The Black experience that has run rampant in popular culture is one of perpetual struggle, especially following the year 2020 when social media was being used to propagate videos of Black people being brutally murdered. Mitchell’s photography is therefore radical in that it swims against that stream of media and visualizes the idea of Black utopia. Utilizing the reach of social media, Mitchell relays his vision of a Black utopia, and, ultimately, his work diversifies the narrative of the Black experience in popular culture to include crucial visuals of Black joy.     

Utopia is typically defined as the imagination of a reality in which everything is perfect, implying it is a lofty figment. While this notion may seem to echo the premise that American idealism founds itself upon, which our culture’s tendency to perceive itself as flawless, Mitchell’s images propose Black utopia as an entirely different perception of American reality and expose the difference between idealism and utopia. To envision utopia is to dream of a place unencumbered by oppressive ideas and systems, but all the while informed by those systems. To idealize is to excuse those systems which only further ingrains them into the fabric of American society. While Mitchell’s work never loses sight of the tangible struggles of Black people in America (apparent through his inclusion of toy water guns and motifs of chains), it asserts that Black people have the right to dream, to play, to be joyful. Acknowledging the seeming unreachability of utopia, Mitchell remarks that he “love[s] photography’s possibility of allowing [him] to dream and to make that dream become very real” (DIoA). In other words, photography for Mitchell not only allows him to edge closer to his idea of pure bliss for Black people, but by capturing that idea within a photograph he catalogs it within the sea of images already existing within popular culture. To photograph utopia is to fully realize it because it imprints that image within our collective consciousness that is already so primed by modern mass media. 

Growing up immersed in that sea of mass media, Mitchell’s work directly responds to the photography that filled his Tumblr page, and, specifically, its lack of Black representation. Scrolling through his feed, Mitchell remembers all he would see were images of white models having fun, the sort of freedom that made him consider “what white fun looks like and this notion that Black people can’t have the same” (M.C., 2021). He cites skate photographers Larry Clark and Ryan McGinley for his interest in skate photography but also for this unilateral portrayal. Even before becoming a photographer himself, Mitchell was gathering the fuel for future groundbreaking work to depict what this ‘Black fun’ could look like. After starting his journey by filming himself skating in an emptied pool, Mitchell’s work now visualizes Black life as beautiful, sensitive, and joyful. Creating his “visual text of hope” (DIoA), Mitchell reimagines the Black aesthetic as much more dynamic and multifaceted than mass media allows it to be.  

From Mitchell’s debut monograph I Can Make You Feel Good, this image depicts two bare-chested young Black men on a swing set. Their hands grip the chains of the seat holding them up, and their denim jeans crinkle in the foreground as the foliage blurs indistinguishably in the background. The subjects’ facial expressions are stoic and stern, yet there is a freedom in the image communicated almost entirely through their being outside, even though their environment is not even in focus. The swing set has a dual role in contributing to the significance of the piece: it evokes nostalgia for the playgrounds of our childhoods, suggesting a frivolity to their state, but the chains simultaneously remind the viewer of the oppression that Black people face. Mitchell remarks in his interview with the Detroit Institute of the Arts that he includes these multifaceted symbols in his images as “subtle reminder[s] of the ways in which the Black body is still politicized and sometimes unable to move through the world as freely as I might like,” (DIoA). The subtlety of these symbols leaves room for two truths to stand at once, for the image to envision the existence of Black utopia while not losing sight of the continuous tangible struggle of Black people. The idea of movement is also intriguing to explore here. Swing sets imply in the name a very mobile nature to them, a sense of action, but in the image, there is no visual signal that the men are in motion, which reflects Mitchell’s sentiment of the non-agency of the Black body.

Recent technological advancements are democratizing the art of photography through more widespread access to the Internet and social media; yet, this is not the first time Black art has reaffirmed Black culture against white-centered narratives. While some claim we are witnessing a “Black artistic renaissance” (Campt, 2021), contemporary artists like Mitchell are part of an ongoing cadre of Black artists using their work to intervene with culture and politics ranging across the African Diaspora. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s signified periods when Black art was carving out space for itself within disciplines whose popularized works almost solely reflected aspects of white perspectives. What is revolutionary about recent Black photographic work is its shareability. Because of technological advancements like the smartphone, more young, amateur Black photographers can have access to a camera, and because of the Internet and social media, millions more people have the chance to see that photographer's work. As the virtual world begins to overlay our physical world, platforms like Instagram, or Tumblr in Mitchell’s youth, aggregate cultural artifacts as it evolves in front of our eyes. We form our sense of culture by judging the content we scroll through, and by providing an outlet to share their work, social media acts as a virtual social network through which even young amateur Black photographers can fill this virtual aggregation of culture with their vision of the Black experience at a magnitude never before seen. 

Mitchell’s work is keenly aware of this power of virtual social networks; wielding the power of this virtual social network for emerging artists, Mitchell’s work re-enters the virtual echo chamber that inspired his work. His work was born out of an absence, out of a lacking. In social media, he did not see models that looked like him or images that reflected his experience of Blackness. His interest in photography came out of his observing the community in the first place through Tumblr. After watching the 2000s skate culture mesh with photography and film in that virtual world, he then decided he wanted to contribute to the world himself. In this way, harkening back to Sianne Ngai’s conceptualization of “community sense”, he brought a new community sense into existence by first judging the community he was already a part of himself. By sharing his images online through Instagram, one of the leading social media outlets that represents our generation’s form of Tumblr, Mitchell puts images right back into the confluence from which his inspiration was born. Now, his images are suffusing our current visual field with a new perception of Black beauty and existence, one that is characterized by joy, frivolity, and bliss that Mitchell saw media was devoid of in his youth. Just as culture shapes images, Mitchell’s images are reshaping culture.

Mitchell’s work lies at the edge of our communal sense of what Black art needs to be and pushes those edges outwards. By centering Black joy in his work rather than burrowing into Black suffering and hardship, Mitchell’s nuanced work reimagines the Black experience and serves as a new visual for the Black aesthetic. What is unique about Mitchell’s artistic sensibility is his awareness of social media’s influence on our sense of culture. As the virtual world becomes increasingly more integrated with our physical world, social media acts as a time capsule for our judgment of what we deem important or representative of American culture. When the images filling his feed during his adolescence were not representative of his experience in America, Mitchell’s body of work now defines a new time capsule, one that includes Black joy within a sea of content that only depicts the Black experience as unending suffering.

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Tillet, S. (2020, December 8). Tyler Mitchell’s love for a common way of life. Aperture. 

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