‘Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real’ featuring Garrett Bradley at Photo Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland

20 February 2025

From 28 March, Photo Elysée presents ‘Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real’ featuring Garrett Bradley. The exhibition covers nearly ten years of Mitchell’s dynamic artistic practice in photography and video, demonstrating the influence of the “New Black Vanguard,” which American writer Antwaun Sargent describes as the proliferation of images by Black photographers who work between the genres of art and fashion. Considered in three thematic sections that follow different motifs, and featuring his newest works printed on fabric and mirrors, the exhibition encapsulates Mitchell’s diverse explorations of portraiture, nature, and social memory.

Central to the exhibition is a display called 'Altars/Acres', featuring photography and mixed media sculptures by artists whose work deeply resonates with Mitchell’s own creative lineage, such as Garrett Bradley, Rashid Johnson, Baldwin Lee, Gordon Parks, Grace Wales Bonner, and Carrie Mae Weems. This unique intergenerational dialogue sets Mitchell’s photography within a wide spectrum of experimentation, intellectual heritage, and cultural expression.

Bradley’s films explore the space between fact and fiction, embracing modes of working and of representing history that blur the boundaries between traditional notions of narrative and documentary cinema. Her rigorous explorations of the social, economic, and racial politics of everyday life—its joys, pleasures, and pains—are lyrically and intimately rendered on screen.

Find out more via Photo Elysée.

Image: Garrett Bradley, 1924 - Ball, 2019, Inkjet on soft matte paper, Paper Size: 30.5 x 42.9 cm, Paper Size: 12 x 16 7/8 in, © Garrett Bradley, Courtesy Lisson Gallery