The photographs of the young US star Tyler Mitchell

Nobody can be that nice. Tyler Mitchell sits on the stage of the Delphi cinema and talks relaxedly about his trip to Berlin. He ate schnitzel and met his idol, the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, and that makes him happy. Mitchell is a star himself: in 2018 he photographed Beyoncé for the cover of “Vogue” magazine, the first black artist ever to do so. A year later, one of the portraits was included in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Mitchell was just 24 years old when he was on his first peak his career as an artist and fashion photographer.

It hasn’t gone to his head, as was easy to see during his Berlin talk with Christoph Ahmend from “Zeit”. The American, born in Atlanta and now living in the New York district of Brooklyn, greets his mother in the audience, who has come with him from the States and is now sitting in the cinema, and talks about the exhibition “Tyler Mitchell. Wish This Was Real” at C/O Berlin. It is Mitchell’s first institutional solo show in Germany. It opened with a DJ set, and around 3,000 guests crowded into the vernissage in and around the Amerika-Haus.

Chanel und Street Credibility

Now it is quieter, but a young, cosmopolitan audience still flocks to the rooms with the predominantly large-format prints that span the past ten years. Mitchell is at the cutting edge of the times, dealing with the aesthetic rules of social media and the fashion world as casually as only an artist of his generation can: Chanel and street credibility combine to create a visually unbeatable blend.

“Atlanta,” a motif for “iD Magazine” in 2021, reveals his strategy. Even if the girls in their Chanel jackets seem to have been taken at random, there is not a single scratch on their single-speed bikes – the pedals of which they would never pedal in their fine sling pumps. The logos on the sneakers of the young people riding through a housing estate in the photo “Motherland Skating” (2019) seem so deliberately placed in the picture that no distinction can be made between advertising and a snapshot. Mitchell’s work is undoubtedly characterized by gloss.

A sack for twins

But his universe extends far beyond fashion and beauty. It leads to a rugby field and a river bank, where Mitchell arranges strangely still picnic scenes that are originally linked to a white cultural history. The young photographer visits black people to document the family heirlooms they surround themselves with in their homes, and he portrays twins – calmly and highly sensitively when he lets two men slip into a sand-colored jacket, each with one arm. The two share a piece of clothing and are therefore dependent on each other.

© Tyler Mitchell

The exhibition begins with the title video “Wish This Was Real”. A clip with ambient music in which four black boys drive remote-controlled mini cars or aim Nerf guns at each other. The fact that they belong in college rather than kindergarten is irrelevant given the playful self-forgetfulness that one watches spellbound. Until two of them hold a large, yellow link chain and another tries to get air under the cling film that covers his face. In moments like these, Black Lives Matter turns out to be pure utopia.

What Tyler Mitchell formulates in the artificial, candy-colored protective space of art is still wishful thinking. The water guns in the video are reminiscent of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was killed by the police in Cleveland in 2014 because he was handling an airsoft gun in public. Two years earlier, Trayvon Martin was shot dead in Florida by a vigilante group member who found the African-American teenager “suspicious.”

Experiments with fabric and mirrors

Mitchell, who graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2017 with a Bachelor of Arts, comes from an educated middle-class background. Atlanta, where he grew up, is considered the black cultural capital, and police attacks are almost non-existent. Nevertheless, his pictures give an idea of ​​how deeply rooted the fear of racially motivated violence is; that it is absorbed and internalized, even without a concrete threat. The message of omnipresent arbitrariness and danger is inscribed, it has a latent effect.

The fact that Vogue commissioned the first black photographer to create a cover photo 130 years after its first issue also leaves a mixed feeling. But Mitchell is not seething. His interpretation of the “New Black Vanguard”, the name chosen by the writer Antwaun Sargent for the image production by black photographers that balances between art and fashion, is reflective and subtle. With clever insertions of art historical iconography, which Mitchell is of course familiar with.

His most recent works at C/O Berlin experiment with fabrics and mirrors, and in the middle of the exhibition space he uses the installation “Altars/Acres” to reveal the artist’s role models: Rashid Johnson, Gordon Parks, Grace Wales Bonner, Carrie Mae Weems – and Toni Morrison. But there is another interesting experience that one has even among Tyler Mitchell’s fascinating work: what it is like to simply not be present as a white person in a free world filled with happiness and kindness.