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Gagosien Quarterly

Winter 2021 Issue

Social Works II:Tyler MitchellA New Landscape

Tyler Mitchell speaks with Antwaun Sargent about Black representation, the diversity of Southern landscapes, and the importance of play in his new series of photographs. The conversation forms part of “Social Works II,” a supplement guest edited by Sargent for the Winter 2021 issue of the Quarterly.

Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Lunarlander), 2021. Photo: courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Lunarlander), 2021. Photo: courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Tyler Mitchell

Tyler Mitchell is a photographer and filmmaker who works across many genres to explore and document a new aesthetic of Blackness. In 2018, he made history as the first Black photographer to shoot a cover of American Vogue, introducing Beyoncé’s appearance in the September issue. The following year, a portrait from his Beyoncé series was acquired by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, for its permanent collection.

Antwaun Sargent

Antwaun Sargent is a writer and critic. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications, and he has contributed essays to museum and gallery catalogues. Sargent has co-organized exhibitions including The Way We Live Now at the Aperture Foundation in New York in 2018, and his first book, The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, was released by Aperture in fall 2019. Photo: Darius Garvin

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Antwaun SargentYour 2020 series I Can Make You Feel Good was about utopia and the ways in which a Black utopia could be imaged through your aesthetic lens. Here, with the new work, you’re engaging with landscape, the idea and the genre. What led you to explore this notion of landscape?

Tyler MitchellI Can Make You Feel Good was a response to the idea of representation. A lot of the images in that body of work are a cross between personal work and commissioned work in the fashion space, so all of those works think more in terms of portraiture, the history of representation, and how I’d like to photograph or imagine young Black folks existing in a fashion context. It was also a response to the work of photographers like Ryan McGinley and Larry Clark. With I Can Make You Feel Good I envisioned new protagonists inhabiting this idea of free youth or utopia—namely, young Black men and women relaxing and enjoying one another. With my new project Dreaming in Real Time, several questions arose: What spaces do these protagonists inhabit? In what spaces do they interact? What is our historical and contemporary relationship to physical land?

I think a lot of that started coming to life for me over the last year, when, due to covid, I wasn’t able to visit Georgia, the land I’m from. I spent a lot of time dreaming about that land in a nostalgic way. The images came from that longing, the yearning to depict groups of Black folks simply existing, enjoying, and belonging to land.

ASIn works such as Georgia Hillside (Redlining) and Riverside Scene, you situate these young figures in the landscapes of Georgia. In Georgia Hillside (Redlining) you have a juxtaposition between the idyllic scene and these red lines you’ve painted onto the hillside. That juxtaposition creates a tension between the past and the present. How are you speaking about the past in the contemporary moment through these images?

TMI think a part of those images, and of that project in general, is being in direct conversation with the history of the “pastoral.” The impetus being, How do I photograph Black folks enjoying or being on Southern land? You can’t really talk about Georgian land, American land, or Southern land without talking about redlining and the systemic racial division of Black folks. It’s a systemic denial of mobility. When you think about the ways Black folks have been told they are or aren’t allowed to move around on the land, that’s what those lines are calling into question or bringing to the fore.

Another reading of those images that I thought was interesting, and that came up through conversations with friends, was that they also become lines for the eye to follow through the frame. So not only do the lines bring to the fore this not-so-subtle history of systemic racial division and prevention of mobility on land, but they also become potential pathways for connection between the figures in the images. The lines actually allow the viewer’s eye to travel playfully through the composition of the photograph. All those devices work on multiple levels in this new work.

Social Works II: Tyler Mitchell | A New Landscape

Tyler Mitchell, Georgia Hillside (Redlining), 2021. Photo: courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

ASIn contrast to the racial histories that have Black populations arriving in cities, in the Great Migration et cetera, these images are asking, What does it look like when Black folks are in rural landscapes? The work explores how histories of sharecropping, histories of redlining, have shaped our relationships to the land and how we operate and live on the land.

TMAnother goal of these images is to ask, How do we socialize and interact and exist in the face of historical divisions? And how do we flourish in spite of those things?

ASYou have three very different topographies in this series. In Georgia Hillside you have a hillside of course, in the Albany, Georgia image you have the sand dune scene, and then in Riverside Scene you’re on the bank of a river. I was wondering if you could talk about moving among those landscapes and why it was important to show that variation.

TMI thought it was a beautiful task to show the sheer diversity of the landscapes of Georgia. I mean, nothing about any of those landscapes tells you exactly where we are, right? There’s no “Welcome to Georgia” sign or Atlanta skyline. But you do feel a certain history of Southern landscape in the images. The way Riverside Scene is framed makes you wonder if it’s in Mississippi, maybe, or Tennessee—there’s a loose allusion to the area of the American South. By showing the region’s sheer diversity, the series suggests both that the way Black folks exist on land can’t be pinned down and that the land of the South itself can’t be pinned down. There’s a vastness and a variety to both aspects.

Social Works II: Tyler Mitchell | A New Landscape

Tyler Mitchell, Albany, Georgia, 2021. Photo: courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

ASIn terms of commercial versus conceptual art, do you view them as two different practices or do you think of them all as being after the same sort of feeling?

TMThere’s definitely a difference between a Vogue cover or an i-D magazine spread and a personal project, but I certainly hope that all of my works, whether they’re commercial or personal or in the fine-art context, are in dialogue with one another. Aesthetically, structurally, conceptually, I hope together they show a growth and a continuum over time. Even if you think about my images of Beyoncé, or some of the images from I Can Make You Feel Good, in relation to this new work, I would hope you would find an aesthetic continuation, whether it’s Black folks’ relationship to nature or a reference to the historical lineages of the ways we’ve been photographed. In the Beyoncé images there are floral crowns and custom scenic painted backdrops that refer to a number of things, including African portraiture of the 1960s. I hope that my work across both commercial and fine-art contexts continues this reference to the historical and is in conversation with the ways Black folks have portrayed themselves in images with a sense of dignity and beauty over time. I also have my own conceptual concerns, like life in the South.

ASYou had a Gordon Parks Foundation fellowship in 2020, and you’re presenting a different body of work concerned with notions of family and the histories that produce, say, a Black middle class or upper middle class as part of that initiative. These images explore interiorities and the materiality of the interior. You’ve concentrated in a lot of ways on this idea of the family photograph.

Social Works II: Tyler Mitchell | A New Landscape

Tyler Mitchell, Chad and Dad, 2021

TMThe work for the Gordon Parks Foundation reemphasizes the importance of the family photograph. There’s a significant history behind the way Black folks dress themselves for a portrait, and I argue that that process has become a central site where identity and a sense of self-determination are formed. I photographed real families in staged settings, or in domestic settings that are their own, and I emphasized the importance of these settings as sites of formation of identity. We see father-son dynamics, we see mother-daughter dynamics, and we see how these dynamics put together through images are a huge part of the formation of Black folks themselves. The family portrait is central.

ASIn viewing this new body of work, I’m struck by images like Ancestors, in which you have a mother and daughter looking at their own reflection in the mirror, and in front of that mirror there’s sort of this rephotography happening of these older images of family members in frames. It makes me think about Elizabeth Alexander’s book The Black Interior [2004], in which she argues that the Black living room was one of the first sites of freedom for us.

Social Works II: Tyler Mitchell | A New Landscape

Tyler Mitchell, Ancestors, 2021

How important is a sense of play in your work? If you think about the work you’ve produced thus far, there are always these moments of play interwoven into the scenes. I’m thinking about the gummy-bear scene from your film, or the boys riding the tricycles. Or even in Albany, Georgia, you have a father and son playing together, you have a sister and brother throwing a football, and you have another young child in the background driving a toy truck. Can you talk about the sense of play and why that’s important to represent in your images?

TMAmy Sherald and I were talking about the sense of play in both of our bodies of work and she said she’s had conversations with artists who feel as if they’ve had to create teaching moments with their work about history and about our struggle, both of which are very important. But we both started to wonder throughout that conversation, When do we breathe? There has to be room for a range of experiences. Because if there isn’t, how do we evolve? I really like that notion and I think that question is where a lot of my work stems from. How do I offer narratives of play, of repose, of rest, of solace and belonging? Because those are images that we need to see as well. And it’s not to diminish the importance of work about history or about our struggle, which is equally real, but when you consider the history of photography, the overwhelming narrative or stereotypical image made of us really doesn’t show us at play. So where’s the radicality of just imaging two young Black men enjoying a pack of gummy bears together? I think it’s there.

Artwork © Tyler Mitchell

Social Works II: Curated by Antwaun Sargent, Gagosien, Grosvenor Hill, London, October 7–December 18, 2021

The “Social Works II” supplement also includes: “Manuel Mathieu: The Delusion of Power; “Amanda Williams: What Black is This”; poetry by Raymond Antrobus and Caleb Femi;“Kahlil Robert Irving”; and “Sumayya Vally and Sir David Adjaye”

Tyler Mitchell and Zoé Whitley

In Conversation
Tyler Mitchell and Zoé Whitley

Tyler Mitchell sat down with Zoé Whitley, director at Chisenhale Gallery in London, for a conversation as part of Frieze Masters Talks and in partnership with Gagosien. The two discussed Mitchell’s first solo presentation in London and with the gallery, Chrysalis, on view earlier this fall at Gagosien, Davies Street, London, and a special commission for Frieze Masters 2022 that reflected on his conceptual and editorial photography practices. His work reinterprets the tropes employed in both the Western canon of portraiture and the contemporary fashion magazine.

Image of boy submerged in water with multi-colored balloons

Tyler Mitchell: This Side of Paradise

Brendan Embser reports on his encounter with Tyler Mitchell’s newest series of photographs, addressing their aesthetic motifs and art-historical references, while charting the development of these works in relation to the photographer’s earlier projects.

Five white objects lined up on a white shelf

to light, and then return—Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann

This fall, artists and friends Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann will exhibit new works together in New York. Inspired by their shared love of poetry, fragments, and metamorphosis, the works included will form a dialogue between their respective practices. Here they meet to speak about the origins and developments of the project.

Close up self portrait of the musician Anohni

ANOHNI: My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross

British-born, New York–based artist ANOHNI returned with her sixth studio album, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, this past summer. Here she speaks with Michael Cuby about the genesis of the project and the value of life.

Robbie Robertson

In Conversation
Robbie Robertson

The musician Robbie Robertson is having quite a year. The Rock & Roll Hall of Famer is rolling out a new record, for which he designed all the album art; a documentary based on his memoir Testimony; and the score for Martin Scorsese’s film The Irishman. Derek Blasberg met him at his LA studio to talk about how he’s created his music for decades and, more recently, his artwork.

A woman stares forward and stands with her arms raised and draped in a white cloak.

Body Horror: Louise Bonnet and Naomi Fry

Cultural critic Naomi Fry joined Louise Bonnet for a conversation on the occasion of Louise Bonnet Selects, a film program curated by the artist as part of a series copresented by Gagosien and Metrograph. The pair discussed how the protagonists of the seven selected films are ruled, betrayed, changed, or unsettled by their bodies, focusing on David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979).

Christopher Makos, Andy Warhol at Paris Apartment Window, 1981

In Conversation
Christopher Makos and Jessica Beck

Andy Warhol’s Insiders at the Gagosien Shop in London’s historic Burlington Arcade is a group exhibition and shop takeover that feature works by Warhol and portraits of the artist by friends and collaborators including photographers Ronnie Cutrone, Michael Halsband, Christopher Makos, and Billy Name. To celebrate the occasion, Makos met with Gagosien director Jessica Beck to speak about his friendship with Warhol and the joy of the unexpected.

Two people embracing and sitting on a large grass field

International Center of Photography: Love Songs

This summer, the International Center of Photography, New York, is presenting Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy. Featuring the work of sixteen contemporary photographers, the exhibition is a “remix” of an earlier iteration at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, organized by Simon Baker with curator Frédérique Dolivet and Pascal Hoël. The curator for the New York presentation, Sara Raza, met with one of the participating artists, Aikaterini Gegisian, and the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier to discuss the distinctions between the two shows and the importance of—and complexities around—visual pleasure.

The exterior of Lina Bo Bardi’s Casa de Vidro in Sao Paulo Brazil

The Square São Paulo: An Interview with Mari Stockler

Curator and photographer Mari Stockler and Gagosien director Antwaun Sargent met to discuss The Square São Paulo, the third installment of a cultural exchange series established by Bottega Veneta in 2022. Marking the brand’s ten-year anniversary in Brazil, the exhibition and publication project, initiated by Bottega Veneta’s creative director, Matthieu Blazy, and curated by Stockler, took place at Lina Bo Bardi’s legendary Casa de Vidro.

Multiples dancers in bright costumes against a yellow backdrop. Five have their backs to the camera with their arms stretched out and two are sitting center stage.

Sasha Waltz: “In C”

Alice Godwin speaks with German choreographer Sasha Waltz about the evolution of her dance In C, the democratic nature of the piece, and its celebration of life and human connection. 

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Lynn Hershman Leeson

In this ongoing series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents make a selection from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the second installment of 2023, we are honored to present the artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson.

Portrait of Edward Enninful

Fashion and Art: Edward Enninful

Edward Enninful OBE has held the role of editor-in-chief of British Vogue since 2017. The magazine’s course under his direction has served as a model for what a fashion publication can do in the twenty-first century: in terms of creativity, authenticity, diversity, and engagement with social issues, Enninful has created a new mold. Here, Enninful meets with his longtime friend Derek Blasberg to discuss his recently published memoir, A Visible Man.