Tyler Mitchell Wants To Haunt You
a conversation with tyler mitchell on spirit photography and his new exhibit at gagosian, 'ghost images'
This blended essay features an interview with Tyler Mitchell. His responses are italicized, while my questions are bolded — edited for concision. For optimal reading, click the subject line to enjoy the full version in your browser.
Nothing holds time like the sand. Each particle, compressed by erosion and weathered over millennia, contains a fragment of the past. Deep in its silt and sediment are the remnants of a past life — the shells of extinct creatures, the pores of ancient coral, layered like memories. Even the fleeting moments of childhood, sealed in buried time capsules, are entombed within its rubble.
The full-bodied hourglass holds time, too; yet its ephemerality is marked by grains of sand as it weaves down from the glass bosom to booty, only to be flipped and reset before the last drop of the hour. We try to hold onto it. Puncture it. Capture the memory before it slips out. Once it’s gone, we are left with our imagination to recall its image in the present.
Perhaps, the only parallel to the sand’s preservation of time is the capture of a photograph through the lens of a camera.
Time, and the concept of capturing it, are the focal points of Tyler Mitchell’s Ghost Images, an exhibition of new works now at Gagosian New York. Set on the shores of the Jekyll and Cumberland Islands in Mitchell’s home state of Georgia, the collection contrasts the beauty of the barrier’s marshes and dunes with that of his subjects — a rich tableau of characters, drifting in and out of opacity like ghosts of a special flesh.
The sand of the islands, only 15 miles apart, archives the history of the transatlantic slave trade. In 1858, the Wanderer — a luxury yacht illegally repurposed into a slave ship — transported nearly 490 slaves from West Africa to Jekyll Island. The vessel returned to America five years before the Emancipation Proclamation, making it the penultimate American slave ship and the last to arrive in Georgia. Many slaves fell ill and were thrown overboard due to the cramped, unsanitary conditions. Before the emancipation, for a period that spanned 115 years, the Cumberland Islands were home to 15 plantations. Slaves who survived the cross-continent voyage faced a new horror on the island and were put to work with labour consisting of agriculture, such as sea island cotton and rice cultivation, skilled labour like carpentry and blacksmithing, and domestic work.
Under Mitchell’s lens, the territory is reimagined. Through stunning vignettes, the artist invites the viewer to traverse the islands from various angles. One vantage point is retrospection, in that the work captures the early moments when the Wanderer, and ships like it, descended upon the islands. In the titular Ghost Image, a young Black man is held captive — by the camera, yes, but predominantly by a fishing net, nodding to the bondage of chattel slavery that anchors his memory to the gulf.
Another perspective is that the images subvert the shores’ bloodied history with an element of play. A familial cast frolics across the historic destination, signaling the reclaim of a traumatized past. Scenes of leisure are found in the works Rock Skip Tableau, and Bather. The images reflect the contemporary understanding of the islands, now popular family destinations known for beachcombing, turtle rehabilitation, swimming, and relaxation.
But there is a third, more imaginative view: the pictures point towards a reimagining of history and depict a Black utopia in which Mitchell creates a new universe altogether. Unmaimed by slavery, the souls linger and what was once a ruin is now a paradise. By printing on innovative materials, like mirrors that invite the viewer into the frame, Mitchell is yanking the present into the past and creating a new tense, a new dimension for his tableau to exist. Through this, the artist does not only reference old histories; he creates new ones, too. When you catch yourself in the mirror, you’re implicated by his world-building — submerged into Mitchell’s imagination.
When I look at your images, I get the sense that there is a duty to reflect the contemporary leisure of the island but also marry it with the colonial history of the environment. How did you approach this transition of memory and time?
We are headed towards me being a professional artist for nearly ten years, so there are certain signatures and elements that I return to. I established a language, and get to elaborate and play on it, but fundamentally, find new ways to restate my original intentions.
Ghost Images focuses specifically on coastal Georgia because I feel that the history of that place — that has somewhat of everything and nothing to do with the work itself — is bound up in the current moment of our country. I was very fascinated by the history as well as the beauty and the amazing warmth of coastal Georgia. The enchantment I felt in the whole region. But also the spirits I felt there: the way the Spanish moss hung from the trees to the buildings that have had tons of history, both horrific and joyous... I wanted to take those feelings and ideas and draw them out visually. That’s how it started.
I’ve always been interested in a photograph being open enough that it can serve as a metaphor for many things. One of the burdens of the medium, that I both love and hate, is that it has to deal with time. There have to be markers within a photograph, especially as we talk about portraiture — what they are wearing, how they’re styled — as to when the image is made. This may lock a photograph in certain places of time. It may date a photograph… and that could be a good or bad thing because it can constrain the ideas within the work to that particular time. In a way, I’ve tried to unlock that by making the styling intentionally opaque. You can’t always tell if a photograph that I’ve made was from today or a hundred years ago. I like playing with that slippage in time and trying to ultimately root it in the contemporary present, as I am a young artist.
I like to create and play with archetypes. I like to not overstage so there is an openness. And ultimately, I’m storytelling and so I look at the images the way a director would a movie.
Mitchell has experimented with illustrating scenes of Black leisure while integrating the postcolonial with the pastoral over his career. These elements have become a part of his visual language. His images have a buoyancy and warmth that lifts as much as it defies.
Ghost Images marks Mitchell's first exhibition of new work at Gagosian since the gallery announced its global representation of the artist. The partnership with Gagosian underscores Mitchell's artistic excellence and commercial success, which resonates within and beyond the gallery's walls.
Over the past decade, Mitchell’s images of Black utopia have been seen by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Portrait Gallery in London and Washington, D.C., the Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki, the Photo Elysée in Switzerland, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and Foto Arsenal Wien in Vienna — to name a few. His book, I Can Make You Feel Good — a work of optimism that challenges historical representation through lush images of the Black carefree — has been widely celebrated. Finally, his collaborations with brands such as LOEWE, Wales Bonner and Prada and publications like British Vogue, The Wall Street Journal and i-D Magazine, remain a constant source of inspiration.
Many admirers of his work first became aware of Tyler Mitchell from his groundbreaking cover of the 2018 September issue of American Vogue, featuring Beyoncé ‘in her own words.’ This made him the first Black photographer to shoot the magazine’s cover in its then-126-year history. To quote Beyoncé, a ‘first’ of many, when she became the first Black woman to headline Coachella — “Ain’t that bout a bitch?”
This year, Mitchell will continue his contribution to fashion and art as the official photographer of the exhibition catalogue for Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, the Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Ghost Images grasps at Mitchell’s established aesthetic and shifts it into something different tonally. Even on its buzzy opening night, where Tyler drifted happily from room to room, greeting guests in a chic pink Dries Van Noten top, I noticed his images’ capacity to haunt. The softness of his subject’s humanity, traditional Mitchell hallmarks, were present but tinted through a new gothic gauze.
His decision to showcase images on translucent fabrics, hanging outside of their frames, not only conjured ideas of spiritual levitation but also spiritual release. No longer confined to a frame, Mitchell has allowed his ghosts to exit the shell.
This work embraces long-running themes of mine like uplift, joy, self-determination, empowerment and agency – but what I feel most proud of is to think about those in conversation with transgression. With apparition. With lingering. With haunting. Haunting in a way that can sometimes be grounded and haunting in a way that can sometimes be truly haunting.
With Ghost Images, Mitchell can see dead people and, though their arresting gaze and mirrored materials, perhaps they can see you too.
I want to zoom into what you said around the spirituality of the work and hear more about the inspiration behind Ghost Images. The camera is a perfect tool because it holds time, as you mentioned. There’s also lore about how the camera can capture the spirit and freeze people into the frame. To me, that’s almost the ‘inside joke within the inside joke’ of Ghost Images. What inspired this initial reference of the Southern Gothic?
Portraiture is a huge part of what I’m known for and what I do. The first impulse was: is there way in which I could materially make the people I photograph haunt the gallery space? Could they emerge or recede into the wall? Could they create a sense of hypervisibility and invisibility, two ideas tied to Blackness in America? The title is so simple but, as you said, calls forth so many associations. You said ‘To capture one's spirit.’ I’ve done a lot of research on the 19th century tradition of spirit photography, where photographers were really convinced that they could capture pictures of ghosts and spiritual entities. I love those ideas as they relate to Blackness in America. I do believe that presence and the history of the past never leaves us. I wanted to use photography to have that conversation and move beyond what is seen in front of the camera, but what is also felt.
I really like this quote, from Carol Armstrong, a great writer who was doing a review of a photo show from 2005, called The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, which was entirely about spirit photography:
‘Any photograph is a trick, after all—a conjury of optics and a chemical reaction, which happens below the threshold of sight. In it, magic and science are not far apart.’
This really sums up why I would call the show that. I’m fascinated by photography being an alchemical reaction beyond what we can just physically see.
More than his previous works, I found myself preoccupied with Mitchell’s depiction of water. The blades of his waters are dark and uninviting yet, somehow, seductive. At times, gripping like the steady sludge of molasses. His sands transports me to a variety of coastal destinations — the beaches that raised my father in Barbados, where the water could be dangerous then docile, the hot dunes and sandy hills of Provincetown, the tantalizing oceans of Mati Diop’s Atlantique, and the oil slicked waters of Hanlan’s Point. But, with the history of the Wanderer fresh in my mind, the memory that is uncorked is that of a children’s book: Freedom Child of the Sea.
Richardo Keens-Douglas's story begins with a boy nearly drowning in the waters off the coast of an island. The boy is saved by another boy who seemingly has control of the water, and gently ushers him to the surface. This rescuer, described as having a 'beautiful' and 'angelic' face but a body covered in welts and scars, is the titular Freedom Child of the Sea. We learn he was born in the ocean after his enslaved mother, stolen from Africa and sickened by the slave ship's conditions, was thrown overboard while pregnant:
“The sailors took her up on deck and threw her body over the side of the ship. Miraculously, as her body hit the water, the silky wetness caressed her skin. It was the softest touch she had felt since being taken from her home. And as her body slowly sank, with her last loving breath she gave birth to a baby boy, and together they gently floated to the bottom of the ocean.”
It is explained that the welts of the boy represent ‘all the pain and bondage of the human race,’ and when that pain is eradicated, his whole body will be as smooth as his face. Only then, will he walk on the shore with his mother.
I imagine Mitchell’s work to exist in a similar world to Keens-Douglas’s story, one where The Freedom Child of the Sea has lifted the nets that trap the young man in Ghost Image. The waves of their beaches are connected, simultaneously churning through ideas of Black horror and freedom.
Upon re-reading the book, I couldn’t help but connect Mitchell’s images of joy in coastal Georgia to the story’s illustrations. Mitchell’s models' faces are soft and their bodies are unmarked, indicating that, perhaps, in Mitchell’s world, his subjects have moved beyond the pain that previously entrapped them. Maybe the Freedom Child of the Sea has finally found land.
Bodies of water have been speckled through your work. You return to it in Ghost Images, but it also seems like the water is a terror and a part of the haunting. As I think about the history, the water is the vessel for the transportation of slaves, but also the graveyard for many slaves that have been thrown overboard. How does water function as a part of this work?
I love the associations to water within my work. I’ve really explored and played with that symbol many, many times over, for all the reasons you kind of just said. It’s both a freeing and constraining, ever-present and deeply historical symbol. It calls forward histories, troubles, death and life. That’s what the symbol does for me, at least.
In this work, life is lived in coastal Georgia on the water. For me, I use it as a symbol to play with and allow the viewer to bring their own baggage to the work. I don’t try to be prescriptive about whether the water, at any given moment, is dangerous or inviting or freeing, but often people in my photographs in water are caught between moments of transcendence and sinking.
The question I’m trying to ask is: What baggage are we as viewers bringing to images of Black people with, in, around and near water?
Weathered earth begets sand. Sand filters water. Water gives life. Mitchell twists the snatched waist of the hourglass to his liking, freezing his subjects in the frame, sliding the sands of time forward and backward to suspend us in his purgatory.
In totality, Mitchell’s Ghost Images provide an enriching tapestry of humanity through the enduring presence of the spirit. The ephemeral nature of memory and time offers many entry points to engage in the work. But Tyler invites you to see it yourself and draw your own conclusion:
The goal is an openness in the interpretation. Of course, specifics are important. However, I like that a work, once I’ve left it on the wall or the page, for someone to encounter becomes theirs. Their associative memories. Their histories. Their past. Their engagement. They look at someone having an experience near water, and they are transported to those sense memories of similar experiences.
To me, of course, I’m being very explicit that these are made in coastal Georgia. That has to do with my own personal history where I grapple with a part of my own home state that I actually have never lived in and have very seldom been to. That’s my journey. However, when the photographs are met by a viewer, there’s their own baggage and I really like that cross-diasporic, global aspect to what photography can do. So I welcome that exact openness and wish to make a metaphor of what is going on in my pictures.
If in New York, I encourage you to see Tyler Mitchell’s Ghost Images in person, running until April 5th, 2025 at Gagosian. Special thanks to Tyler Mitchell and the Gagosian team for collaborating with me on this very special dispatch.
LOOSEY is a bi-weekly newsletter about culture, art, technology, and the way we live. If this is something you like, consider subscribing and sharing. Let’s be friends on Instagram.
tyler is truly one of the greats. thank you thank you for this!
👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽