‘Chrysalis’, a picture by Tyler Mitchell, portrays a young sleeping man under a mosquito net. Eyes wide shut, he appears to be navigating the complex folds of a dream, the past and present in surreal collision. Mitchell is intrigued by compositional layering like this.

His work, he tells Rianna Jade Parker, is coated in a barely visible atmosphere, a strangeness that tugs it back many years, to the nostalgia of youth, family and our natural surroundings.

His debut solo show in London presents images that tap on the history of Black life within the American south, talking to a ‘fundamental resilience, radiance and full human agency’ in its people. The netting, invisible or not, through which his work is filtered is there to be overcome and broken through.

You’re most known to your fashion and documentary photography, but you might be also a positive art photographer. What are the markers of distinction in these genres for you, and do you might have a preference?

Tyler Mitchell: I feel that for quite a protracted time, there’s been external pressure from the surface world to make a choice and follow that. I actually have this long trajectory of being from Atlanta making skateboarding videos and a few music videos,

which got me as much as Recent York for film school. I desired to tackle photography in all its many forms, but I had anxiety about deciding what was more necessary; an image printed on a magazine page or an image exhibited in a gallery or museum space.

I still think that, in people’s minds, photography is burdened by the difficulty of facts and biography; it at all times has to clarify where the image was made, who’s in the image, and all of those documentary facets. Our experience of a picture we all know is universal,

we realize it is so all-encompassing. And what I’m realising now’s that each excite me equally and that hopefully, with the position I’m in at this point in my life as an artist, [I can] proceed to level the boundaries and the borders.

You could have said previously: “I’m a concerned photographer. There was a ladder for the individuals who got here before me, and there’s a ladder now – it’s only a recent ladder.” This also rang true for photographer Gordon Parks who,

within the preface of the second edition of his 1966 autobiography A Selection of Weapons, wrote: “I didn’t set out to evangelise sermons or deliver profound messages. I simply desired to get a number of things off my chest that weighed heavily upon it for too a few years.”

Tyler Mitchell: You understand, I did the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship, and you possibly can see threads of his work in my very own. I’m absolutely hoping to get things off my chest in the way in which that Parks felt he needed to, to form of utilise his camera as a tool to speak concerning the way Black folks lived.

But there’s something else occurring in my work as well, a sensibility of just pure leisure I suppose, almost frivolity. In this fashion, a theatrical or childlike nostalgia of surrealism enters the work.

You’ve come a good distance since your first camera, a Canon 7D, and your degree from Recent York University, but any artistic practice is at all times in flux and malleable. With time and access to resources being less of a barrier for you now, what technological advancements are you looking forward to exploring?

Tyler Mitchell: I feel like a luddite in this fashion. Within the early 2000s, there was this big push towards the whole lot going digital – like, forget analogue, forget chemicals and determine how one can use a DSLR camera. And that’s precisely the purpose at which I used to be a young person.

There’s been a little bit of a reverse where older photographers have now taken up digital and don’t look back, but actually, photographers in my generation, I sense, are picking up analogue cameras and going the [other] way.

So my hope is to be the very best at operating any camera, to select it up and make an incredible image with a degree and shoot as impressive as a four-by-five large format.

Your first solo exhibition in London, Chrysalis, will add some much-needed color to the flurry that’s Frieze. You’ve said that we are able to expect to see “various states of self-protection, repose, struggle and self-determination.” I’m wondering, what are you protecting yourself from as of late?

Tyler Mitchell: On this recent world that we’re in, which is form of on the opposite side of a pandemic, mortality is far more apparent, but in addition, socially, I feel like everyone’s in additional of a protected zone. I’m indulging myself in the way in which that making pictures for me is a type of protection.

I’m capable of create and live out these little moments or small figments of dreams through which Black people exist inside the space of a frame where they’re unencumbered. They’re not having to be hypervigilant about social and political dangers, the hypothetical threat of a white gallery space, or any of this stuff that remind them to get out and stay out.

You could have a really distinctive style and sense of purpose once you’re pointing your camera. What or when would you concentrate on ‘your peak’?

Tyler Mitchell: The major goal for me is to be compulsively prolific. I need to have a profession in making images, still and moving, for the following 30 years. I’m not saying all those images are going to [meet with] equal degrees of success. I’m open to the concept the next periods of my work might not be as great as others, or they could be even higher. An important part for me is to proceed being prolific.

I’m on this place that’s each emerging and never emerging at the identical time. I’m emerging into myself, and this body of labor is a recent step, a stronger and more defined step. I’m sitting squarely inside my world that I’ve created photographically, on the intersection of business and conceptual, and I’m advancing with a recent language.

What are the constructing blocks of this recent exhibition and the way did you start to conceptualise it?

Tyler Mitchell: In the brand new body of labor, you will note quite a lot of calmly staged scenes through which I tell short narratives about young Black life. You will note a picture of a boy covered by a mosquito net lying on top of layered, quilted bed sheets. In one other frame, a young woman is tucked in an idyllic seductive, but in addition somewhat threatening wall of white picket fences.

We also see young boys wading, swimming and struggling through mud. And so, in a method, this shows becomes about elements, seductive and threatening, but in addition foundational elements of southern American or global diasporic life.

Water, specifically, as a form of baptismal element within the sky. All of those elements appear within the exhibition, each artificial and real, as symbols of spiritualism, aspiration and transformation. I feel the pictures suggest [a] core fundamental resilience, radiance and full human agency that Black folks command, even in environments that tell them otherwise.

For you, what are the nice and possibly not-so-good differences between presenting your photography in a white-walled blue-chip gallery in comparison with high-fashion editorials?

Tyler Mitchell: I’m actually thinking about my images existing each on the published pages of magazines and in a business context, in addition to in gallery museum contexts. And positively, I need it to be acquired by individuals who need to have a serious and useful dialogue around my work.

All those things, I feel, are possible. You understand, I feel that battle of asserting photography as an artform was one [challenge] prior to now, [because] those artists wouldn’t find a way to work commercially for fear of curators taking a look at them a certain way, and of being considered ‘less serious’. But my assertion without delay is that as a photographer, this work that we do is a deeply enriching craft.

Tyler Mitchell: Chrysalis is at Gagosian, Davies Street, London, October 6-November 12, 2022