Tyler Mitchell - Wish This Was Real

Since his rise to prominence in the worlds of art and fashion—including his iconic covers of Vogue magazine and his photography for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Superfine: Tailoring Black Style - American photographer Tyler Mitchell has created images of beauty, utopia, and the American landscape that expand the imaginary of Blackness in the twenty-first century.
Mitchell’s artistic practice is animated by dreams of paradise and transcendence against the backdrop of history. Wish This Was Real, published by Aperture, is a comprehensive look into the subjects driving his work, from his genre-bending portraits made in the United States, Europe, and West Africa to his photographs printed on diaphanous fabrics and sculptures that reference domesticity and Black intellectual heritage. Offering 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 (born in Atlanta, 1995) is a Brooklyn-based artist, photographer, and filmmaker. He received a BFA in film and television from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2017. Mitchell’s work has been published widely in magazines and his work is in numerous private and public collections. 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. His solo show Wish This Was Real is on shop at MEP, Paris until the end of January 2026.

Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real, published by Aperture and also available at aperture.org

Format: Softcover
Number of pages: 272
Number of images: 168
Publication date: September 9, 2025
Measurements: 21 × 27,5 cm
ISBN: 978-1-59711-575-9