Mr. Mitchell, you shot your now iconic cover photo of Beyoncé for American Vogue at just 23 years old. What has changed for you as an artist since then?
I think since then, I've really moved towards exhibiting my work more. I've enjoyed doing exhibitions, because they last. They have prolonged, engaged dialogue. There's a very deep dialogue that happens with the community, whether it's Berlin, or Atlanta, or London, or New York; when I've done shows in these places, I really feel a kinship with those places, I feel a kinship with the people in those places, I get to engage in a dialogue with the curator that is very thoughtful, and that feels like exercising a different muscle than say working in the magazine world. I love making work for magazines! Being published in a very broad and almost pop culture context is exciting to me and has always been — but as I've just evolved and grown, being able to tell stories in this format feels very pertinent and important to me.
And now at just 29, you’ve done numerous solo shows at prestigious galleries and museums, and have work held in several private and public collections. It’s an amazing feat for someone so young.
I’m so grateful for the continued and sustained engagement in my work. Even with my new show at C/O Berlin, Wish This Was Real, that’s a survey of my work that goes back 10 years… I’m still very young, so to have my work shown in a museum that has also done very historic shows with titan figures in photography like Mary Ellen Mark or William Eggleston, it’s really incredible. Those milestones are important in an artist's career, even this interview, the fact that there’s someone who might read this and take something from it, that is an important part of the dialogue of my overall practice. I'm just one of many artists who deserve that level of engagement, and that's only made me feel more encouraged to make the work I do. Every time I get published or exhibit work, I feel more empowered to keep telling the stories I want to tell.
“All of these depictions of youth were early inspirations, but channeled through my own lived experience, my own filter; I’m often making things I would like to see or experience.”
Where does that interest in visual storytelling come from?
I think telling stories visually is something that comes to me naturally, it’s something I’ve always been drawn to. I was raised watching some of the movies that my father was really into, ones that I would say that were outside of the conventional, outside of what was playing at the local movie theater in Atlanta, Georgia. He was really into Hollywood classics. Alfred Hitchcock, neo noir and noir films, suspense, thrillers. Those were very formative because there's something very classical about their storytelling structure. I think I’m very much indebted to those mid-century American ideas of narrative, they inform my work in loose ways.
You were also a Tumblr kid, right?
Sure, I can’t deny the influence of Tumblr on my work as a visual storyteller. Seeing images in that kind of context growing up... That showed me what creative photography was, and what it can do. As a teenager I was looking at work by Ryan McGinley, Larry Clark, Petra Collins… All of these depictions of youth were early inspirations, but channeled through my own lived experience or my own filter; I’m often making things I would like to see or experience, if that makes sense?
One good example of that would be your immersion in nature for Dreaming In Real Time, your photo series that took you back to your native Georgia to re-explore the landscape.
Yeah, making work at home is something that has opened me up. When I think back about making those photographs, it's really opened up a lot of possibilities for what my work can be about. It feels good — there's nothing like making work at home, and I think that was the first time I really did that in a very formalized way. And I think that that was a very important breakthrough for me personally. It was a very euphoric creative experience. It was very free-flowing, I was conceiving these ideas and images off of memory, working off the nostalgia of what it felt like to grow up there, rather than what it is to be there now as an adult. And that created a certain type of work. I was identifying the emotions I was going through while growing up there, and now I have the hindsight to understand them; and then I made art about that. For me, Dreaming in Real Time was about the memory of growing up there, rather than documenting what Atlanta is like now. And that’s a very particular kind of photo-making.
Although your photos have strong narratives, it seems like some ideas also stand alone as simple expressions of fun, joy, or surrealism, like your photo Vastness, which features a child wearing a cartoonishly large shirt.
Oh, definitely. Part of making the work that I make is really about fun. As simple as that is. It’s about creating a sense of play in the work. To a degree, all of the work is sort of seeking this sense of me discovering something, or exploring something, or playing with something, or acting out a dream scenario — otherwise it doesn't feel as exciting to me. I’m interested in exploring the concept of play and leisure and what that is and who it’s for, but It’s also very lived, embodied experience because the people in the photos are experiencing those moments when we’re making them. It’s about the collective experience of young black men and women coming together to play, but it’s also a collaborative experience with them.
You’ve described that as “giving other black kids the opportunity to do the things in your photos, because you’re curating that life for them.” I love that a political statement doesn’t have to be a really overt rallying cry; it’s also the idea that participating in everyday beautiful activities can be radical.
Yeah, and I try to be clear about the distinction of activism. I think activism really is defined by policy change, by overt resistance, protest, or things like town halls or gatherings that create real change. Art creates change, but it does so differently. I'm interested in, as you've sort of already said in your question: how does everyday embodied life intersect with political ideas? My practice is about showing other embodied and lived experiences while still considering the political conditions in which we live.
That much is clear, even from your earlier work like Wish This Was Real, a video of young black boys playing with water guns and plastic chains, which I read as an exploration of innocence, fear, and identity… I was struck by the story, even if I didn’t know exactly what the story was.
Art has always been a visual medium first. It's not an academic medium, so it’s not meant to be didactic in that way. It's meant to be visceral. Photography in general as a medium is really as much about the image as it is about the baggage that we bring to viewing images in an image-loaded culture. So with my work, there’s definitely a desire to make something that is implicit and visceral in the way you mentioned.
How mapped out are these concepts and narratives before you head outside or onto a set to shoot them?
It’s quite loose! I have an idea in mind and I want to go out and make a photo of it, but I also have to allow some elements to be played with. It’s a very human experience in that way. My practice is about pushing myself, exciting myself, surprising myself. I think my photographs are often best made when they're not too over-constructed when they're not too over-considered. So I have the ingredients: people, environment, narrative, props — but none of it is storyboarded. Once I bring the ingredients together, it’s about playing and improvising. Nothing is drawn or dictated.
Does that change when you’re working in fashion photography or doing a shoot for a magazine?
For me, it’s a mixture of both. I think you can feel when photography is depicting real fractions of moments, and you can also feel when the situation has been overtly constructed. I try to avoid that feeling. You want to have some structure, you want to know a little bit of what you're doing, but you want to let it be loose enough that the pictures feel exciting, so that you can have those happy accidents, and space for that little bit of magic.