American photographer Tyler Mitchell is driven by dreams of paradise against the backdrop of history. Since his rise to prominence in the world of fashion, Mitchell has propelled a visual narrative of beauty, style, utopia, and the landscape that expands visions of Black life. Photo Elysée presents Mitchell’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland, offering new perspectives on his longstanding themes of self-determination and the extraordinary radiance of the everyday, and showing how photography can be rooted in the past while evoking imagined futures.

Wish This Was Real explores Mitchell’s work, from his early portraits and videos that pursue dreams of leisure and self-expression to his elaborate landscapes that revel in visions of paradise underscored by the complexities of history and social identity in the United States. Central to the exhibition is a display featuring photography and mixed-media sculptures by artists whose work deeply resonates with Mitchell’s own creative lineage, such as Rashid Johnson, Gordon Parks, and Carrie Mae Weems, a unique intergenerational dialogue that sets Mitchell’s photography within a wide spectrum of visual experimentation and intellectual heritage.

Wish This Was Real is curated by Brendan Embser and Sophia Greiff and is produced by the C/O Berlin Foundation.

Tyler Mitchell (b. 1995, USA) is a Brooklyn-based artist, photographer, and filmmaker. He received a bachelor of arts in film and television from New York University Tisch School of the Arts in 2017. Mitchell’s work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Brooklyn Museum; Detroit Institute of the Arts; FOAM Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Pizzuti Collection of Columbus Museum of Art; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; and Cleveland Museum of Art.

In 2018 Mitchell was commissioned to photograph Beyoncé for American Vogue’s September issue, making history, at the age of twenty-three, as the first Black photographer to shoot the magazine’s cover. Mitchell’s photography has also been published widely in magazines, including Aperture, Dazed, i-D, Interview, M Le Monde, Vanity Fair, American and British Vogue, W, WSJ, and Zeit Magazin. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world: The New Black Vanguard (Aperture Gallery, New York); I Can Make You Feel Good (FOAM, Amsterdam, and International Center of Photography, New York); Social Works II and Chrysalis (Gagosian Gallery, London); and Domestic Imaginaries (SCAD Gallery, Savannah, Georgia).

After being presented in Berlin and Helsinki in 2024, Wish This Was Real is making a stopover at Photo Elysée before its presentation in Paris in autumn 2025.