Tyler Mitchell: Ghost Images

“About
And this beauty carries within itself the intimation that the past can never die because it still exists, intact, on some other plane of time, around which we cannot see directly.
—Clarence John Laughlin

The way we disappear. And reappear.
—Robin Coste Lewis

Gagosian is pleased to announce Ghost Images, an exhibition of new works by Tyler Mitchell. Opening on February 27 at 541 West 24th Street, this is the gallery’s debut exhibition of Mitchell’s work in New York, and the first since announcing its global representation of the artist.

Engaging with Southern gothic themes, Mitchell’s new images of seaside leisure (all works 2024) are rooted in his Southern upbringing and explore the psychological space of memory, questioning how photographic tableaux might capture presences that are unseen but deeply felt. They also ask if photographs have the capacity to document memory and express self-determination in the light of history.

This body of work was shot on Jekyll and Cumberland Islands, off the coast of Georgia, when Mitchell returned to his home state in preparation for Idyllic Space, his 2024 exhibition at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. The images are set among the beaches, dunes, estuaries, park structures, and ruins of these barrier islands—landscapes of natural beauty that are imprinted with significant human histories. In 1858, the penultimate ship known to have transported enslaved people to the United States landed on Jekyll Island, an event to which the toy boats in Gulfs Between allude. Now protected as national seashore, Cumberland Island is the site of a ruined mansion owned by the Carnegie family, who once controlled much of the island.

Old Fear and Old Joys and Buoyancy are scenes of leisure and evocative compositional suspension. In many of the works, Mitchell veils his subjects. Ghost Image features a boy peering out through a shroud-like net, while the figures of Convivial Conversation and The sky is cold but the wing blood hot are transformed by scrims of sheet and kite that channel the sunlight. The artist further explores layering and ephemerality by innovatively printing photographs onto mirrors, and onto sheets of fabric draped over empty frames. Inspired by photographers who were drawn to intangible aspects of space, spirit, and the human form, including Clarence John Laughlin, Frederick Sommer, and Francesca Woodman, Mitchell employs superimposition, multiple exposures, and fragmented composition to assert material presence while picturing apparitions of the past.

Wish This Was Real, an exhibition of nearly ten years of Mitchell’s work, is on view at the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki, through February 23, and will travel to Photo Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland (March 28–August 18, 2025), Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (October 15, 2025–January 25, 2026), and Foto Arsenal Wien, Vienna (Spring 2026).

Mitchell is photographer of the exhibition catalogue for Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, the Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In addition to documenting the exhibition’s objects, he is contributing a thirty-two-page section of photographs that will celebrate its themes.”

https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2025/tyler-mitchell-ghost-images/