Tyler Mitchell and Simon Baker in Conversation at Art Basel Paris
Join acclaimed photographer Tyler Mitchell and curator Simon Baker at Art Basel Paris for a conversation about Wish This Was Real (Aperture 2025), the definitive early-career survey of one of the most compelling photographers of his generation.
Tyler Mitchell’s photography is animated by dreams of paradise and joy against the backdrop of history. Since his rise to prominence in the worlds of art and fashion, Mitchell has created images of beauty, utopia, and the American landscape that expand the imaginary of Blackness in the twenty-first century. Presenting new perspectives by leading writers on his long-standing themes of self-determination and the extraordinary radiance of the everyday, Wish This Was Real shows how photography can be rooted in a collective past while evoking imagined futures.
Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real was made possible, in part, through lead support from Coach.
Image: Tyler Mitchell, Ancestors, 2021; from Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real (Aperture, 2025). © Tyler Mitchell and courtesy Gagosian
Tyler Mitchell (born in Atlanta, 1995) is a Brooklyn-based artist, photographer, and filmmaker. He received a BFA in film and television from New York University Tisch School of the Arts in 2017. Mitchell’s work has been published widely in magazines, including Aperture, Dazed, i-D, Interview, M le magazine du Monde, Vanity Fair, Vogue, W, WSJ Magazine, and ZEITmagazin. His work is in numerous private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Brooklyn Museum, all in New York; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and National Portrait Gallery, London. In 2018, Mitchell was commissioned to photograph Beyoncé for Vogue, making history, at the age of twenty-three, as the first Black photographer to shoot the magazine’s cover. Mitchell’s first solo exhibition, I Can Make You Feel Good (2019–20), was presented at Foam, Amsterdam, and at the International Center of Photography, New York. He is the photographer of the catalog for Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, the Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His solo exhibition Wish This Was Real (2024–26) opened at C/O Berlin in 2024 and toured to the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; Photo Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; and Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.
Simon Baker has been director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, since 2018. He was formerly senior curator of international art (photography) at Tate, London, and was associate professor of art history at Nottingham University. He has published widely on both photography and the history of art, including the monograph George Condo: Painting Reconfigured (Thames and Hudson, 2015), often specializing in surrealism and its legacies in contemporary practice.
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