Tyler Mitchell and Salamishah Tillet on Black Utopia

Watch a recording of the talk here.

Tyler Mitchell’s iconic photographs of Black individuals playing and at ease in public are what Salamishah Tillet calls a “profoundly radical act.” Blurring the line between art and fashion photography, Mitchell’s images capture a Black utopia filled with community, love, and tenderness. In this conversation, Mitchell and Tillet consider what Black utopia looks like in today’s world.

In the Winter 2020 issue of Aperture magazine, “Utopia,” artists, photographers, and writers envision a world without prisons, document visionary architecture, honor queer space and creativity, and dream of liberty through spiritual self-expression. They show us that utopia is not a far-fetched scheme, or a “no place” (the literal meaning of the word utopia), but rather a way of reconsidering the everyday.

Tyler Mitchell (American, b. 1995) is a photographer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, working across many genres to explore and document a new aesthetic of Blackness. Mitchell is regularly published in avant-garde magazines, commissioned by prominent fashion houses, and exhibited in top tier institutions. In 2018 he made history as the first Black photographer to shoot a cover of American Vogue for Beyoncé’s appearance in the September issue. In 2019 a portrait from this series was acquired by The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery for its permanent collection. This, alongside many other accomplishments, has established Mitchell as one of the most closely watched up-and-coming talents in image making today. His first solo exhibition ‘I Can Make You Feel Good’ at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam (2019) premiered video works including ‘Idyllic Space.’ An iteration of this show is now on view at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. Mitchell has lectured at a number of institutions on the politics of image making including Harvard University, Paris Photo and the International Center of Photography (ICP). In 2020 Mitchell was announced as the recipient of the Gordon Parks Fellowship which will support a new project that reflects and draws inspiration from Parks’ central themes of representation and social justice. Mitchell’s fellowship will culminate in an exhibition of the new works at the Gordon Parks Foundation Gallery in Pleasantville, NY.

Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Creative Writing and African American and African Studies at Rutgers University – Newark, and the faculty director of New Arts Justice, an initiative for feminist approaches to socially engaged art at Express Newark. She is a contributing critic at large for The New York Times and the author of “In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of Alice Walker’s Masterpiece” (Abrams, 2021), “Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Duke University Press, 2012) and the recipient of the Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant for her work-in-progress, “All The Rage: Mississippi Goddam and the World Nina Simone Made” (Ecco, 2022). With her sister, photographer Scheherazade Tillet, she founded A Long Walk Home, an art organization that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women.

Image: Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Toni), 2019

In conjunction with the release of “Utopia,” Aperture is excited to launch a series of digital programming to accompany the issue in partnership with London-based fashion brand JW Anderson.