A Portrait of the Artist Tyler Mitchell

What does photography need to do now? Artist Tyler Mitchell has been asking (and attempting to answer) that question since making history as the first Black photographer to shoot a Vogue cover back in 2018. Since then (he was only 23-years-old at the time) his work has been celebrated in museums around the world, featured in publications like Vanity Fair and W, and, ultimately, published in his debut monograph, I Can Make You Feel Good. He joins us this week around the opening of his revelatory exhibition, Ghost Images https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2025/tyler-mitchell-ghost-images/, now available at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City. View the works discussed in our virtual gallery here https://talkeasypod.com/tyler-mitchell-gallery/ or visit talkeasypod.com/tyler-mitchell-gallery/. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:21Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:38Sam Fragoso?

  Today, artist, photographer, and filmmaker Tyler Mitchell. At just 23 years old, Mitchell made history as the first black photographer to shoot the cover of American Vogue. The now iconic images featured a very regal Beyoncé perched on a throne and a floral headpiece, a nod to the bygone era of Renaissance portraiture. A year later, in 2019, a photo from that same editorial was acquired into Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery's permanent collection. At the time of the momentous announcement, Mitchell wrote that, quote, "A year ago today, we broke the floodgates open. Since

• 1:23Sam Fragoso?

  then, it was important to spend the whole year running through them, making sure every piece of the gate was knocked down." In the intervening six years, he's continued to do just that. His work has been exhibited in galleries around the world. He's collaborated with dozens of brands and publications, including Louis Vuitton, Loewe, Marc Jacobs, Vanity Fair, W, and The Wall Street Journal. He's also published his stunning debut monograph entitled "I Can Make You Feel Good," which came out at the height of the pandemic and served for many, I think, as a window into a life full of friends and sunshine and seemingly

• 2:07Sam Fragoso?

  clean air that, at that time, felt pretty irretrievable.

• 2:12Sam Fragoso?

  Mitchell first came on Talk Easy around the book's release back in 2020, but he joins us this week with his latest project, Ghost Images, an exhibition of new works at the Gagosian Gallery, which you can now see in New York City through April 5. I went to the opening reception of the show and I have to say it was amazing, not just in its artistry, but also in the way that Tyler has really inspired this next generation to pick up a camera and just start shooting. The line for the event wrapped around the block and there were apparently some 1,200 people in less than two hours that made their way into the gallery,

• 2:55Sam Fragoso?

  many of whom seemed like they were coming from a class. Could have been high school, could have been college. They all just seemed young to me and I felt profoundly old. But I also felt really inspired and proud, not just of what Tyler has built, but what I know he'll continue to build in this next chapter at Gagosian. And so for today's episode, in the spirit of the exhibition, we've put together a virtual gallery of his work, a kind of retrospective that we walk and talk through throughout this conversation. If you'd like to look while you're listening, you can visit talkeasypod.com/tyler-mitchell-gallery.

• 3:39Sam Fragoso?

  You can also just visit talkeasypod.com and click the big button you see in the middle of the homepage. I've also put the link in the description for easy access, which you can find on your phone now. Again, that's talkeasypod.com/tyler-mitchell-gallery. We've done these guided virtual exhibits in the past with Joel Meyerwitz and Hank Willis Thomas, but this episode, probably even more so than those, plays just fine if you're driving or walking or just don't want to look at your phone for an hour, which I understand. But if you can, Tyler's photographs are really something special to take in.

• 4:22Sam Fragoso?

  And it will only add to the experience of this episode. As always, you can reach us at [email protected]. We've enjoyed so many of the notes that we've been getting. Guest suggestions, the feedback, or just the reflections that we get from people listening to new episodes and some old ones deep in the archives. So we thank you for that. Again, [email protected]. And you can visit the gallery at talkeasypod.com/tyler-mitchell-gallery. And now here is Tyler Mitchell.

• 5:21Sam Fragoso?

  What do you think we should title this episode? Like Tyler Mitchell Returns? Tyler Mitchell Round Two Dead Reckoning?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Dead Reckoning. He's back. The ghostly apparition, the return.

• 5:34Sam Fragoso?

  Whoa, Tyler in ghost form. Are you ready to do this?

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:40Sam Fragoso?

  Tyler Mitchell, welcome back to the show.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me back. It's fun.

• 5:43Sam Fragoso?

  How are you feeling?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Feel good. This excites me because it's been five years.

• 5:47Sam Fragoso?

  Five years.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:48Sam Fragoso?

  When we sat in August of 2020, it was around the release of your debut monograph, I Can Make You Feel Good, which you described as, quote, "a gesture of optimism", which, by the way, like in August of 2020, that was a bold stance.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:07Sam Fragoso?

  There wasn't a lot of optimism August of 2020.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  No, and there ain't a lot now.

• 6:11Sam Fragoso?

  No.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  So what's going to change? There's always what you, what the reality is, which is important. And there's kind of what an artist chooses to focus on or put out into the world, I guess. But no, you're right. I think we pressed print on that book in March 17th of 2020. So I wasn't even able to get on the plane to go and see the book get made. But then the week after it came out, it was. Completely sold out and did really well. So clearly people wanted to live with something that had the title attached to it. I can make you feel good. Which was nice.

• 6:39Sam Fragoso?

  Also, a lot of the photos happen to be people together outside, things that at that point, outside of a protest in May and June of 2020, people really weren't doing.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:51Sam Fragoso?

  So take us here like five years later, you have this new show at the Gagosian. It's called Ghost Images. What would you say that's a gesture towards?

• 7:03Sam Fragoso?

  You're nearing 30 now.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Nearing 30 now. I think the work is clearly complicating, maturing. I think it's lovely how it started off so colorful in a way and has moved into like a show about ghosts. People are like, what? What does photography need to do now? I think is the big question that it that started when I started thinking about this show. Gagosian's a big stage. I'm very happy to have an exhibition in New York at a gallery like that. And it's kind of what do you do as a photographer then? And ghostliness in general. And I would say this idea of could a figure or a portrait of a figure sort of haunt a space? Or be an apparition in a space, sort of recede into the wall as well as appear from the wall towards the viewer?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Those are the questions I started with and making the show. So yeah, it's definitely a shift from that book.

• 7:52Sam Fragoso?

  You said in the press notes that the collection examines whether photographs have the capacity to document memory and express self-determination in the light of history. How do you understand those questions? Like, can you unpack a bit of how you you approach them and how they arrive in this work?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. What does that mean?

• 8:12Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, that was my way of saying that.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:14Sam Fragoso?

  I need a talk easy translation.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  The translation is how does a photograph go beyond being a document of something? How does it depict a presence? I have been spending a lot of time in Georgia over the past two years for many reasons. I mounted two museum exhibitions, one in Savannah, Georgia, one in Atlanta where I'm born and raised. It was great. It was a very emotional, prideful moment to be with family and to have traveled back to the place I grew up in for the most amount of time since I left there 11 years ago.

• 8:42Sam Fragoso?

  So you had been spending time back in Atlanta and while you're about to mount a show, you think, how can I complicate my life more?

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Can I make things harder for me?

• 8:53Sam Fragoso?

  How could I sleep even less?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 8:56Sam Fragoso?

  And you begin to take these photographs.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  And I start thinking about the presences I personally felt while I was in Savannah.

• 9:03Sam Fragoso?

  Which were what?

• 9:05Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a enchanted, beautiful town. It's a very, sort of, everything's very sensorial. It's very humid. You can cut through the air with your arm. It's very beautiful, these Victorian houses on squares where there's lots of live oak trees with Spanish moss hanging down. I mean, the way the light moves through the trees, like, everything about it sort of enchants you and seduces you. And then you hear about the history that has happened in every institution, every building, the horrors, when you think about, of course, slavery, but beyond into now, in an area like that, the sort of human movement through a place like that, through coastal Georgia. And then, then I was like, okay, I'd love to make something in which it's my own body

• 9:48Speaker 01

  of work that has everything and nothing to do with that history. It's not a history lesson. I'm not interested in making my art and my photography that didactic, but that does evoke some of those feelings I had in that region.

• 10:00Sam Fragoso?

  You're saying you don't want to make work that feels or appears explicitly tethered to that space?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 10:07Sam Fragoso?

  In this case, pretty sordid history.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:10Sam Fragoso?

  Of the land. Like, the Jekyll and Cumberland Islands, which are off the coast of Georgia, they date back to 1858, which scholars have said that the penultimate ship known to have transported enslaved people to the United States landed on Jekyll Island, where you take these photos. What was your experience with those islands, growing up in Georgia? Did you know about them? Were they in the periphery?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  I did know about them, because, you know, I think the Kennedys had gotten married on Cumberland in 1997. I'm born in 95, so throughout my childhood, that was a place where people started to want to go for holiday.

• 10:51Sam Fragoso?

  This is like a Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds, having a

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:54Sam Fragoso?

  wedding at a plantation kind of thing?

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Basically. Like, literally, it's like, okay, this was an island previously, you know? By the Carnegie's, you know, right around the corner is the island you just described with the penultimate slave ship arriving. And then you have the Kennedys getting married.

• 11:09Sam Fragoso?

  Well, you know what? I just sound, I just found out from our producer, both of us have been sued.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  You and I?

• 11:14Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Like just now.

• 11:14Sam Fragoso?

  Mentioning Ryan Reynolds, my part, and you mentioning the Kennedys.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  The lawsuit just arrived.

• 11:20Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, there's not even streaming live either.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  That's funny.

• 11:24Sam Fragoso?

  See, listener, this is, I'm now, I'm gonna break something here. What you're hearing in the opening moments of us together are two people that have spent the last five years kind of being friends and are now talking on microphones and trying to navigate one part friendship and one part NPR style interviewing.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 11:44Sam Fragoso?

  And so we're gonna have to come together in some way to break past both of those things. And we're doing it bit by bit, including the lawsuit joke that we're gonna keep in here.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  And the inside jokes had to become outside jokes and vice versa.

• 11:56Sam Fragoso?

  I know. That space, those islands growing up, what did they mean to you outside of the Kennedy part of it?

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Exactly. From that part, they became these sort of honky, they sort of corny vacation spots. Like, they became these very hype fake holiday spots for people in the South. I would always hear someone of wealth from Atlanta saying, oh, I'm going to St. Simon's Island.

• 12:19Sam Fragoso?

  And those people, you mean white people?

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, if I mean, but, but also maybe I'm like, did black people go? No, black people went to Martha's Vineyard.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Like honestly, like, I don't think I knew, but yes, white people going to like St. Simon's or Tybee Island or, you know, like I said, Jekyll or Cumberland. So, yeah.

• 12:38Sam Fragoso?

  So when you're back on these islands

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:41Sam Fragoso?

  and you're spending significant time there and you're bringing a cast and crew to come and kind of play, how did you hold that history in that moment? Like, does it creep its way into the frame or into your consciousness when you're there?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  It does in the feeling. You can't escape it. Even I also like to observe it through the people I'm photographing. Like, what are they experiencing? Because they're, I'm often casting people who are from the area. So they might be also from Atlanta, like I am, or from South Carolina. One or two people from New York. And we're all coming together down there to make art, right? I'm seeing them see the place for the first time. And they're like, well, we've never been to a place like this before. And you can absolutely feel the ghosts when you're with someone who's experiencing it. I've gone down there, scouted and done the whole thing and researched. But they're just kind of arriving. And that is a really fresh experience for all of us.

• 13:30Sam Fragoso?

  So first couple of images here. The first one was Old Fears and Old Joys. This one, which seems to be like the banner photo for the exhibition, is Lamine's Apparition. So tell me about this photo in particular and the context of what you're talking about.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  So what it actually is, is yeah, a portrait of one of those casted young men. He lives in South Carolina. Great look, has a great look. And I'm often looking online. I'm looking through friends for people. And so again, we went down to Cumberland Island. And this is a portrait of him against the wood paneling of a shack on the island. But he's actually receding into the wood. His skin and the wood are kind of becoming one in the photograph. It is like a double exposure trick. It's when you sort of make, I took a textural photo of the wood and took a photo of him and fused them and sort of blended them. So it's a traditional double exposure. And there's a famous portrait, Frederick Sommer, 20th century, sort of surrealist photographer, took of Max Ernst, famous artist. And that portrait shows a similar thing.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  He's standing, got his arms folded and he's against a wall. And yet, his whole skin is filled up with this deeply haunting, rich, concrete texture. So this photograph, in parentheses, the title is Lamine's Apparition After Frederick Sommer, because it's very much following that tradition. It's a famous photo in photography history and it's taking cues from that.

• 14:55Sam Fragoso?

  In casting a project like this, when you know you're going to bring them to a place that has built-in trauma, are you worried about bringing them there? Like, you worried about who you sign up to be part of this? Like, is that part of the calculation?

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Not at all. They know my work and I think I'm more and more interested in. Of course, people know some of my pictures of, okay, I see he photographs groups, he photographs families in outdoor settings. It is often with that sense of evolving from that book where we talked about I Can Make You Feel Good. It is about this sense of joy or leisure in these outdoor spaces. But these are trips where it's like a collaborative experience with families or people who often have real relationships to each other. And I'm kind of setting up scenarios, but also letting things unfold in front of my camera. And so these people, when I'm bringing them to these sites that have significant human histories, they're feeling it in real time. I don't think that changes the experience we're having while making the photographs, right?

• 15:56Speaker 01

  We're still kind of, in a way, there's a reclaiming happening through making them on this, on this land and through making art, there being something generative that comes of it. But also, I'm examining my own home state, right? So I don't know if I'm thinking of it that way where I'm like, will they be afraid to go to a place like this?

• 16:13Sam Fragoso?

  But you weren't afraid.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  No, and I, I'm curious, like, I've done some, watching of some interviews with someone like Barry Jenkins, for example, right, where he's actually in Underground Railroad, which is a beautiful show, you know, making actors reenact some of these histories, right? So it's, it's different than that in that way.

• 16:30Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, and I would say this photograph, for example, which is called An Embrace, or this one, Gwendolyn's Apparition, are both, like the whole series, recontextualizing the Black experience. Like, you're not making them do a scene from Underground Railroad on this island.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Right, no.

• 16:50Sam Fragoso?

  And I guess, I want to go more broadly for you. Like, so much of your work, when you first sat down, was talking about this alternative, utopic future, where, quote, "Men and women are visualized as free, expressive, effortless, and sensitive." As you come to these islands, where freedom was very much the thing that people did not have, did you know going in that you wanted to juxtapose this present with the sordid past?

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, to a degree, yes. And also, I didn't want to think of... Joy or agency in a very straightforward way anymore. I didn't want to think of it in a very flat way. You know, again, getting away from photographs as things that are strictly documents, moving into a space of them being as metaphors for many layered experiences. Right? And that joy is not something that's experienced, uh, removed away from any of these histories. Right? Or that it happens in spite of them, especially in this moment, when we think about this moment, where things can feel extremely confusing. You're, you're experiencing high highs and yet the, so many of everything else in the world can feel pretty horrible, pretty terrible if I'm being completely honest. And maybe I'm speaking in broad, broad strokes here, but what I'm kind of getting at is like,

• 18:02Speaker 01

  I for myself in my art have started to feel like depictions of my subjects, my collaborators, the people in my photography. It shouldn't simply be about depictions of leisure in a straightforward way or in a flat way. It shouldn't be flat renditions of joy any longer. It should embrace the history of the places where I'm making these photographs. It should embrace my own history of my home state where I grew up. It should explore and interrogate those things while also carrying forth these moments that I think do put forth a narrative of self-determination, of empowerment and agency. Right?

• 18:33Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think that pivot is more a function of your age or the age that you now live in?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Probably some combo of both. I think probably more my age, though.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Gun to my, I was like, wait, gun to my head, which one? I think it's getting older.

• 18:49Sam Fragoso?

  And by the way, we like to ask every question on Talk Easy as if a gun is your head.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Right, gun. There is, there is, for the listeners, just so you know, there's not one. Absolutely.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Blinking twice.

• 19:01Sam Fragoso?

  We, we, we did get sued, but there is no gun. Yes. You know, when we first talked on the record here, stylistically, photographically, there's a huge distance between 24 year old Tyler in the pandemic and 29 year old Tyler going back home to Georgia, spending more time at home than you had since you left. When we spoke, you said, I definitely had a complicated relationship to Georgia. I wanted to leave from a young age. I'd even Googled boarding schools that I wanted to be enrolled in. When you say complicated, what do you mean by that?

• 19:40Speaker 01

  I'm thinking about learning my own relationship to archetypical understandings of my own masculinity as a black man, my own, the demands or expectations of that.

• 19:53Sam Fragoso?

  And you understood the demands of what?

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Oh, in the South, it's pretty, it's pretty strict. The archetypes really are like, let's just talk like about like pathways to be like seen as, as important. It is about athletics. It is about particular stature, way of moving through the world. I think there's a, there was, especially in the nineties, early two thousands, a particular rigidity to that. So like picking up a sport like skateboarding viewed as a very white sport in Atlanta or something like that. Or, yeah, even the segregation of the city itself, it's a great city. It's a city that privileges black artistic production, which I love. And it's also a city that has, yeah, distinctly segregated areas. So I'm going often from a suburb like East Cobb where I grew up to Buckhead in school,

• 20:38Speaker 01

  where there's a predominantly wealthy, homogeneous environment. And so, um, yeah, I would say a homogeneous, wealthy, white environment in my private school. Of course, I was looking up like escape routes, basically. I was like, I, yeah, what could be, could, could a boarding school be better? I don't think it was, but at one moment I had that thought.

• 20:56Sam Fragoso?

  Usually boarding school is what parents threaten to send their children to if they don't behave.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:04Sam Fragoso?

  And you were like, I'm reversing this. I'm threatening my parents.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, get me out.

• 21:08Sam Fragoso?

  With going to a scary, strict place.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:11Sam Fragoso?

  Did that really seem preferable to you than where you were growing up in Marietta?

• 21:17Speaker 01

  I don't know what seemed preferable. At the time, maybe, because I was like, clearly I proposed it, but also I was like, maybe just getting away from this dynamic could be better. And it was, had nothing to do with family life, at home life. It was truly, I can't describe it other than, you know, my school that I went to from third grade until I graduated high school was probably four to 5% black, maybe less. I think there was actually four to five black people in one year of 200 or 300 students. So you just don't see folks that look like you. But beyond that, yeah, it's quite a straight, it's quite a straightforward, um, retrograde kind of idea of a high school, like American high school. It is in that way a stereotype, like. It's just like, there are the jocks, there are this, there are that, there is the hierarchy,

• 22:01Speaker 01

  there are all the pressures to perform. Like, there are so many, if you ask a black person who went to the high school I went to, they're like, oh, wow, you made it out kind of okay. Like, it really was that hard, where I'm, like, I talk about, like, being into things like chess. When I was a kid, my dad plays chess six hours a day. He's a huge, kind of like chess master, I would say. And I had a tutor and the whole thing, and I probably buttoned my polo up to the very top of my shirt. And I remember someone in school, a girl in school, maybe I had a crush on, I think she was like, yeah, like, why, like, chess is like, not the one. So that's what I'm talking, that's what I'm getting at, where it's like, this is a very normative environment. Chess is not the one.

• 22:41Sam Fragoso?

  That is imprinted on you.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is imprinted.

• 22:43Sam Fragoso?

  If someone were to take a snapshot, I was thinking about this, like, if there was a Tyler Mitchell-like photographer, running around Marietta, and they took a photo, a snapshot of your childhood, what would the photo look like?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  So funny.

• 23:00Sam Fragoso?

  What would it communicate?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  It would probably depict a photograph of a kid, depending on the stage of my life, a kid who's probably wearing a really colorful, kind of ugly MTV shirt, way-too-long denim shorts, trying to find his own little style, probably was like influenced by R&B, hip-hop, and skate culture in equal measure, and Donald Glover in equal measure as well. Definitely a nerd, but trying not to be. That kind of stuff was what I was into. It was someone who I could see and say, wow, this is someone who's, yeah, maybe it's not perfect, and maybe it's like, kind of like, you know, especially very, like, unpolished, like, maybe annoying, like, in its early infancy stages, and like, he's someone I respect greatly. But like, the music wasn't always great, you know, but you were always like, wait, I see someone

• 23:46Speaker 01

  who is on a path that seems outside of what I feel I'm supposed to be doing here, and that feels good.

• 23:52Sam Fragoso?

  And did you see your path? For example, when you're 14, and you're going to the skate park with your friend Noah Reyes.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:05Sam Fragoso?

  And there's that DSLR camera. What happens? Is that the beginning of like you finding your way onto a path?

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, to a degree. Cause we're, I'm seeing a new side of the city also, which felt very freeing. Like, I knew the suburbs. That's where I grew up. Pretty much middle class or upper middle class suburbs, had a yard, had a house, had like nice things, didn't have to worry. And then went to this school, private school. Didn't feel so great there, but felt it was a means to an end. But Noah and that whole experience of picking up skateboarding and seeing this other side of Atlanta, which was in Decatur. So if you know that area, it's a much more racially integrated area. It's a tougher area, too. We would skate, we would, we'd eat junk food and go to Target and skate to Target and go in and probably shoplift a bunch of shit and we would.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  So that was like emancipatory, like you're kind of like carving out your own sense of self that's apart from the school, it's apart from the suburbs. Does that make sense?

• 25:04Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, of course. When you were picking up that DSLR camera, did you feel like you had a knack for it?

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Immediately, yeah. Immediately I knew I loved it. I was drawn to it. There was one kid I remember on Facebook, which is probably like early incarnations of now Instagram, like who was posting like creative photos of different people. And there were all these fun filters that were very colorful. And I was like, whoa, I didn't know you could edit a photo, set the colors. Like someone's skin, the grass doesn't have to be green, right? You can slide it and make it pink. When I got the camera in my hands, I started kind of emulating some of those things and immediately it came to me naturally, like I was doing it so well.

• 25:45Sam Fragoso?

  Was your childhood more like mid nineties or Didi?

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Definitely Didi, for sure. Sweet though, Didi has an endearing tone, which is what it like, again, the MTV shirt and they basically being a nerd, but like not like thinking I wasn't, but I absolutely was, Didi for sure.

• 26:03Sam Fragoso?

  A hundred percent.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. I thought I was mid nineties. I had California fever, like fully, like I would watch like the barracks and I would watch like early on future days and I'd be like, that's what I'm doing.

• 26:14Sam Fragoso?

  Dork, what did the girl say to you? Dork is not it.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Jess is not it, just not it. Whatever the version, whatever the two thousand seven version of that is, you know?

• 26:24Sam Fragoso?

  Dork is not it. Okay, as a teenager obsessed with Spike Jones's skate scene, and then photographers like Ryan McGinley and Larry Clark, did you find kinship in the videos and photos that those people were producing? Like, when you were that nerdy polo buttoned up kid, did you see yourself in that work?

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I did. It also felt like what I wanted to be, beyond probably what I really was. Felt like something that was, that was being respected, that was getting a claim, that was being seen as the pinnacle of what free youth is in America, right? And that, so like, it's aspirational. It's also the best part's what fashion does, right? It's like, you do kind of forget, you're like, I don't look, I actually can't wear those clothes. Would look like crazy, but I feel I can. And then I, and then you go and inspires a purchase. So like, for example, like that photography inspired my own, yeah, desire to make that kind of work. Of course, later, as I learned that like, there was such a breadth of black photographers doing their own storytelling of their own communities,

• 27:32Speaker 01

  realized that there were gaps in what they were doing, that there was, that I wasn't actually literally reflected, and that there's something to be done about that.

• 27:42Sam Fragoso?

  We'll be right back with our talk featuring artist, photographer, and filmmaker Tyler Mitchell.

• 27:56Sam Fragoso?

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• 29:27Sam Fragoso?

  I want to talk about some of your early work, which you uploaded primarily to Tumblr back in the day, back when Tumblr was still tumbling.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  I think my page is still out there.

• 29:36Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, it is.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Okay, you found it?

• 29:38Sam Fragoso?

  We found it.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  I want to see it actually, because...

• 29:42Sam Fragoso?

  I went through the archives.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Wow, that is terrible.

• 29:45Sam Fragoso?

  In the summer of 2014, you're about to be a sophomore in college at NYU. And it's then that you decide to leave New York for the summer and head to Havana with your Yashica 35mm camera. Tell me about that trip. Was that when you decided to pivot from filmmaking to photography?

• 30:06Speaker 01

  In a way. It didn't feel like a straightforward decision, but yeah, in a way, that was when I fell in love with it more than film in a way. It's when I kept compulsively taking pictures when I got there for a lot of reasons, but one of them being, it is a, of course, a crazy vibrant country. It has this, what I realized later, right? When I'm a sophomore in college, I'm not thinking about any of this. What I'm realizing later is it has this history of, of course, photographers from America and from the West going down, extracting very seductive touristy photos of the old cars and the colorful environments. And sure, I was doing a bit... Of that, however, I always was turning my lens to like strange little details rather than the macro sort of touristic picture.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  That's what I think unlocked for me. I realized photography can do something because I didn't even realize what I was doing in the moment, except I was just taking all these pictures on this little point and shoot Yashica camera, but it was photographing skaters like the young man up there on the screen, young skater who I met could barely really talk that much because my Spanish was very clunky and you know, he had no English, but there was something there where for me like I'd found basically someone in Cuba who was living experiences I had lived as a teenager in high school, right, in middle school, mixed with architectural details and minutia of the country that I felt told an interesting story. So that's when I started to realize, oh, I'm pretty, I can take a picture.

• 31:31Sam Fragoso?

  You said about Havana that its color palette was a palette you saw life in.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 31:38Sam Fragoso?

  Could you describe that for people?

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Well, I felt like I was for the first time seeing all these buildings that were not beige and brick and gray, right? And that were not how they looked in Atlanta or in New York City, but they were painted the colors I felt, why wouldn't people paint buildings these colors, right? Why wouldn't they be split tone, mint green, and on the bottom, a light bubble gum coral pink, right? Like, that seems fun to me. I loved that idea. And what I realized is, yes, of course, it was a beauty and a vibrance to the island itself and that life was lived outdoors, but also it came out of necessity, that the paint colors were colors the West discarded, didn't want, were cheaper. So I was fascinated by that on a lot of levels and took a lot of pictures of wall, simply just wall colors actually in Cuba.

• 32:25Sam Fragoso?

  Isn't that incredible? Like, the thing that was discarded by the West was the thing that you were explicitly interested in.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Thought it was better.

• 32:34Sam Fragoso?

  Going down there as a 20 year old.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:37Sam Fragoso?

  When you're starting, when you're starting to photograph people that you don't know, what did your approach look like with them? Like, how did you get them to say yes?

• 32:47Speaker 01

  I didn't love it, if I'm honest. That's the one part of Cuba that I felt such creative inspiration there. I felt such freedom. Again, I was drawn to the visual language of the whole country. Also, it was really great because like, actually, people thought I was Cuban there. And there's that level of sort of ambiguity and connection that happens when you see another, and when you land in a country and you're like, these people look like me and they see the same in me. So that was wonderful, but I didn't love it. I always felt I was never interested in approaching photography as like this extractive thing where I'm doing, working in the tradition of street photography. Even when I was young and didn't have the language for that, I knew that wasn't what I was interested in doing. So when I'm making pictures like this, which this is a street scene, this is two young girls who are leaving school,

• 33:30Speaker 01

  who I spoke to a bit, and this is a caught moment, and I spoke to them after I caught the moment, or even someone who I do ask consent to make their portrait. So this is a consenting portrait of a young, of a tobacco farmer in Cuba. And many amazing interactions with many great people, but again, I still felt this was great for now, but it's not the way I'm going to work after this because it felt like the beginnings of almost practice, trial and error, but not how I wanted to make my work, if that makes sense.

• 33:58Sam Fragoso?

  But you come back to the United States.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:00Sam Fragoso?

  But from this trip, you create and self-publish a book of photos called The Package.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:08Sam Fragoso?

  But you don't just self-publish it. You also have to do like your own PR for the book. And I wanted to talk about that period because it's the period before the Beyonce shoot, the exhibitions, you know, this Gagosian exhibit. October of 2015, you go to meet an editor at Daze Magazine in London, where you're sleeping on someone's floor that you met on Twitter. I don't think I'd sleep on someone's floor that I met on X, but I definitely. Slept on someone's floor that I met on Twitter.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 34:46Sam Fragoso?

  It was a different time.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Clear distinction.

• 34:47Sam Fragoso?

  It was really different.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:49Sam Fragoso?

  So when you wake up that morning on the floor of that apartment, do you practice what you're going to say in the meeting with Dazed? Like, do you rehearse in the mirror? Do you have your talking points for the photos you've taken from Cuba?

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Yes, actually. I think I basically rehearsed it. I was so nervous. It was, Dazed was the biggest and the coolest thing to me. They were writing about all the photographers that I had admired in my bedroom on Tumblr in those earlier years. They were doing all the cool coverage of those people, all the cool interviews. I was just like, if I could just get one article on that website, like, I'm good. Like, that's the, like, that's heaven there, right? Like Nirvana. So, yes, I think I literally did practice what I was gonna say and what I was gonna pitch. And I was ready for all eventualities. Like, if she didn't have the time, like, I was gonna show her, like, one. But if she did have the time, like, I'd show her the whole book. But also, it was like, you would properly pitch things in those days.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Like, I think it's also good to set that for, actually for you and for everyone. Like, you would literally pitch yourself. You would, you would not be like, okay, I'll go check out your Instagram later and then I'll write you if I'm interested or whatever the dynamic is now.

• 36:01Sam Fragoso?

  So you cold emailed Ashley Kane.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 36:04Sam Fragoso?

  She meets you at London's Old Street Roundabout.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 36:07Sam Fragoso?

  You two sit down, and how does the interaction go?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Decently.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Decently. I was like, whoa. I walked away from it feeling like she hates it.

• 36:23Sam Fragoso?

  Okay. And but, but what happened in it that made you think she hated it?

• 36:27Speaker 01

  She was very standoffish. Very nice, engaged. The agreement to take a meeting was further than I got with anyone because before we got to this point, I think I'd sent tons of people crazy colored emails in caps and in lowercase saying, don't open this email. And then I would send a pitch or I would send my pitch and it wouldn't go through well. So I was just trying anything.

• 36:47Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, let's go back. What, uh, so the emails.

• 36:52Sam Fragoso?

  Different colors?

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Different colors.

• 36:54Sam Fragoso?

  Explain this.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  I don't know what I was doing. It just, anything to make the email stand out was what I would try. It was a numbers game. But it wasn't, they were sweet. They were super sweet and endearing email. But what they were was trying to at least get someone to open something from, from, from, from a kid they don't know.

• 37:10Sam Fragoso?

  And the subject of the emails were what?

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Sometimes they were, do not read. Don't read this. Don't open this. But then other times they were like, hey, here's my pitch. I'm a photographer. You know, they were sometimes more straightforward.

• 37:21Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  And then sometimes they'd be like, don't open this.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Sometimes those get responses.

• 37:26Sam Fragoso?

  You're too scared to open this. Yeah. Okay. So I, you know, you know, I, like you, when I started writing for magazines, it was all cold emails.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:37Sam Fragoso?

  In my case, it was Playboy, I think Vanity Fair.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  And New York Times, whatever it was.

• 37:41Sam Fragoso?

  All these places, The Atlantic, I wrote for The Atlantic. I didn't know anyone there. And I wrote cold emails. I didn't do the different colored font thing. But I wrote those like, hey, I'm trying really hard here. Will anyone give a shit? And most of them did not.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 38:01Sam Fragoso?

  But it only kind of takes, you know, one or two, and then you have

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Literally.

• 38:05Sam Fragoso?

  Some kind of resume. So from that meeting, you felt, okay, that's a little standoffish. And you took it how?

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Like, damn, British people are tough.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Like, they don't really, that, cause you know, I'm over there wearing my heart on my sleeve and saying all, expressing all my excitement for all of these things. And they're doing none of that. Yeah. And just not moved, not interested. And I was like, surely she would be moved. Like surely there's some, you know, whatever. I don't know. I thought it was good.

• 38:34Sam Fragoso?

  Look at these photos from El Paqueta.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Immediately. Like, you know, but I think that like, I think that taught, what did I walk away thinking that? Just hoping, really wishing on a prayer that she would, that she would be interested and she was. And that was quite a big thing for me. That was when people looked at me as a photographer, really. That's what came out of that meeting. And actually a friendship was formed.

• 38:55Sam Fragoso?

  There's a level of self-possession I've always known you to have. Like, an ambition that has kept you moving forward. That part you've always taken really serious. But the photos themselves, in contrast, exude so much joy. Like, especially the early photos, they exude so much play. Like, you wouldn't look at those photos and think, that person sent emails that said, do not open this.

• 39:24Sam Fragoso?

  Like, I'm thinking the Kevin Abstract magazine cover photo, the Lil Uzi photo. They are explicitly capturing, I won't say black leisure, but like, black joy. Men and women in repose or recline in the spirit of painters like Kerry James Marshall or an artist like Toyin, Oji Adetola. I feel like that's, that seems to be an aim for you in that period. But you began today's conversation being like, I don't want to do that anymore.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:00Sam Fragoso?

  So at that time.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Or I want to complicate what that is.

• 40:03Sam Fragoso?

  Or I want to complicate it. But before it was complicated, how did you understand it?

• 40:08Speaker 01

  I understood it quite straightforwardly, really. As do, as emulating and wanting to do a version, my own, interpret through my own lens, what I saw out in the world, that inspired me. I wanted to, you're right, it was Kerry James Marshall, which was a huge aha moment when my mentor, Deborah Willis, who is the, I would call the, the godmother of all things black photography, took me to a conversation between Kerry James Marshall and Arthur Jaffa at the Met. And for me, and probably for a lot of other people, probably mainly white people. But for me, as a, as a college student who was just getting into all this, it was a real revelation that there was this community of people who already were so tuned into

• 40:48Speaker 01

  ideas around, like you said, self-possession, self-determination, ideas of new visions of black people in photography and in painting. I was just trying to contribute to that, and I was probably just trying to emulate it, really.

• 41:00Sam Fragoso?

  So these early works we're talking about, these early commissions we're talking about. Of Kevin Abstract and Lil Uzi, like, do you think you think you're emulating the work that you were taking in at that time?

• 41:11Speaker 01

  I think so, and in my own way, and like, I think there's also something to be said about like, learning in public, right? Like, there is a lot of that that happens because I started so young and like, now that I'm able to look back at these photos, I certainly was learning in public, taking in a lot and just outputting it through my own lens. And I think context was important, too. Like, for example, there's a shoot that I saw that left an imprint on me hugely of Young Thug by a photographer named Harley Weir, who's a British, young British woman, very influential photographer. She photographed Young Thug in Atlanta in a way I'd never seen an Atlanta rapper be depicted before. He was in a Vivienne Westwood dress. He was also in his tub. The water, the bath water is filled with wands.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  So there's that, there's already that dichotomy where there's, there's that image, and then there's an image of him in a Vivienne Westwood dress beautifully against a dark pink background on the cover of Dazed magazine. So I'm already, there's already like expansions around how musicians look. And these early commissions for the Fader magazine do my own version of that. Like, I think, don't fall into the sort of tropey ideas of indie rapper in quotation marks, or even burgeoning new wave rap pop sensation Lil Uzi Vert in that way. Like, I don't think anyone's made a picture of Lil Uzi Vert like that since or before that as well. And like, I like that I can uniquely say that, and I like that I had to do a lot of work to catch him

• 42:38Speaker 01

  in a space to be able to be depicted that way. So, yeah.

• 42:41Sam Fragoso?

  Well, tell me about the work it took to catch him, and not just him, but when you're navigating the egos of musicians, how did you understand how to do that work then, and how do you understand it now?

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Well, each person is individual, of course. As a photographer, I'm having to read and react very quickly to what I'm seeing him being given. I can talk a little bit about Uzi Vert, but in general, on the whole, I'm actually doing a slight game of reverse psychology.

• 43:13Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, go ahead.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  And I mean, I'm sometimes collaborating, but also sometimes I'm choosing to ignore or withhold, or I'm seeming uninterested in things that are interesting and seeming interested in things that are uninteresting.

• 43:26Sam Fragoso?

  Like the Dazed editor woman?

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:29Sam Fragoso?

  Are you doing that out of self-protection, or you think it's an effective way to get them to do what you want?

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Uh, both, but I also think it could be um, working towards a result without making that result feel affected and working with a person rather than against, right? It's not result directing. It's not, I need you to jump into this pool.

• 43:48Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  It might be being open to the situation, letting it unfold, then encouraging the moment that feels right for the story, or whatever it might be.

• 43:55Sam Fragoso?

  That reverse psychology game, when did you start to develop that?

• 43:59Speaker 01

  I mean, in school where I studied film mainly, I always was trying to avoid what was called result directing, which I just planted into, got into my head that that's the worst thing you could do.

• 44:10Sam Fragoso?

  And explain that for people who don't know.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  So, result directing is if I want you to say a line in a film more angrily, I would say, great, say that more angrily. That's result directing. Whereas, I could also tell you the motivation for why you're angry, which would get you to say it more angrily, but in a particularly pointed way, right? And it would actually come out better. So, that's, that's, as you know, that's result directing. In photography, a variation of that might be, the thing that they're wearing, the headband Kevin Abstrack is wearing is wonderful. It's a signature. I want to do a play on it. How do I get him to, you know, want to do that without telling him? Just play with your headband and stretch it that way and put it at this degree and this angle, because that takes the discovery out of it.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  So, in photography, I'm discovering, trying to let something unfold. And as you said, I'm dealing with a real person in front of my camera. They have desires. Musicians especially have a lot of fixed thoughts about how they want to see and be seen and how they look in the world.

• 45:08Sam Fragoso?

  I actually have not heard you talk about the reverse psychology.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 45:11Sam Fragoso?

  Photographing musicians or massive celebrities that have teams and egos and quote unquote tough schedules, the challenges of making those shoots go, knowing that its success is how you'll pay for your rent. I've always wondered this, which is how do you keep the anxiety and the stress of the work itself, the labor, out of the frame? Like, the anxiety? The sleepless nights that I know Tyler Mitchell has, how does it not ever make its way into a Tyler Mitchell photograph?

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Great question, because it's funny. I just had a, I had a big Vogue cover shoot yesterday where I felt completely manic and completely, yeah, there were, there were paparazzi that showed up. I mean, it was truly manic and I was just calculating so much. And the person I was photographing said he felt such ease and his team, it's always his team that when you can tell, they're like, oh, this is going better than anything we've done in like a year. And I'm like, really? Like for me, I'm spiraling. I don't know how it doesn't make it in.

• 46:19Sam Fragoso?

  And what does spiraling look like?

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Unable to form sentences, not really finishing thoughts, looking at my assistants, wondering if any of it is good, questioning all of it, questioning the light, questioning the background, questioning the whole shoot. Then I started asking questions. Yeah, I'm just like, is this good? And they're like, they're like, yes, this is good. And I'm like, no, you're lying to me.

• 46:41Sam Fragoso?

  So you start, you start looking around.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Trying to bring the best out of everyone is what I can do in a moment of panic.

• 46:47Sam Fragoso?

  Do you hold or do you try to mask some of that fear in front of the subject?

• 46:52Speaker 01

  No, no, no. Sometimes, yes, yes. With Beyonce, yes.

• 46:59Sam Fragoso?

  Yes.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  She can't see a single thing being questioned, you know? But I think that like, and that's not specific to her. That's just, I don't want to let myself get seen questioning anything in front of someone like that, who I hold in such high stature and respect. But I'll talk about a little Usy Vert and specifics, because maybe that's helpful. Like, we got to Hawaii to shoot him for the cover of The Fader. And he's three days late. He does not show, he misses his plane magically three days in a row. And I'm just sitting in Hawaii, which is a wonderful place to sit and wait on a musician to show up. And this was the first time I was experiencing it in real time. And I was like, wow, this is, first of all, insane. I am a little bit worried that he doesn't want to be here, that, I, I know he doesn't want to be here. He doesn't want to do any of this. And yet I have to come away.

• 47:44Sam Fragoso?

  The three flights that he missed in a row that tipped you off to that?

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe by the second when I was like, got it. And I think he showed up and of course he was uninterested. And so what I did was also be uninterested, right? And I, and you, that just happens too, where it's just mirroring, right? And so he's someone who has to walk into the environment, start to slowly feel comfortable, start to slowly feel seen, and then he'll take you on a whole tour around Hawaii. By the end of it, and you have an amazing cover and an amazing shoot, but it takes time. I'm sure you've talked to people like that. And yeah, each case is different. So anyway, I feel like I just went on a tangent, but I wanted to give that specific about Uziver, because I felt that that was a particular moment where I was challenged with meeting someone who just did not want to be photographed.

• 48:29Sam Fragoso?

  In the case of Beyonce, she did want to be photographed. But you, you had to keep a lot in. How does a 24 year old keep a lot in? Like in breaks, do you go to the bathroom and just like scream while the sink is on?

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:46Sam Fragoso?

  Do you hide a lot?

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Whatever my version of that is, yes, I knew I had to show up correct on that day. I knew like that every decision I was making, even if it was bad. And the other thing is what I always have later is the edit. I always have the edit later to save me. If her hair looks terrible, if we can work it to a place where it looks great, I will be okay. If I get that one frame where it looks great, the rest of the working towards it, no one will see. So always in photography, we have that blessing.

• 49:14Sam Fragoso?

  Do you still remember that day?

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Of course, very vividly. I mean, I'm remembering particularly the first shot, the first picture where there were questions about her hair. We knew we wanted her to have these cornrows that weren't intentionally not finished, that were fuzzy, as if they had gotten done two weeks before they had actually gotten done. And it's hard to actually do that, right? She has to do it perfectly and then undo it. There's not much that she or I won't do kind of to a perfect standard, right? Or to demand excellence from something. So for there to just already on the first shot be the intention of an undone hairstyle.

• 49:52Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Challenge the both of us.

• 49:54Sam Fragoso?

  You're leading with imperfection.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  We're starting with that. So I remember that really, really vividly.

• 50:00Sam Fragoso?

  Did it feel like if you didn't get that right, it was kind of a make or break for how the rest of the shoot would go?

• 50:05Speaker 01

  The whole day, leaves with the hair, especially with a woman like her. And it was amazing and, and it did work. I loved it. And so did she. And so that first picture was one where I was extremely nervous and was just like looking at the Polaroids because I didn't even have, oh my gosh, it's crazy to think about now. I didn't, there was no monitor.

• 50:25Sam Fragoso?

  So you had no playback or anything?

• 50:28Speaker 01

  No, that's trust though, from a real collaborator. You know what I mean? I think in these days, there's less and less of that where there needs to be this immediate feedback loop of like, we need to see it on a big monitor. We need to criticize it, pull it apart, change it, make it perfect. She was looking at these little Polaroids. That's all I had. I took one Polaroid, showed it to her. Then the rest of what goes into the can just does not get seen.

• 50:49Sam Fragoso?

  I know people have asked you this a lot. She entrusted you as if you were someone that she had collaborated with for years, as if you were a photographer that had been shooting for years or decades. When you look back on that now, what do you think she saw?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  You would really have to ask her.

• 51:11Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, she's coming on next week.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  When she comes on the show.

• 51:14Sam Fragoso?

  But, um. Well, thank you for manifesting that.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. What I can guess is there was a genuine, and maybe it feels stereotypical to talk about it now, because so many people talk about their photo shoot experiences like it was a dream. Of course, not every photo shoot experience is a dream. You're working through a lot of problems on a photo shoot. But that truly was, there was a warmth that felt familial, from my side at least. I can only guess, and I don't know how it would have felt to her because she does this so much, but because I'm kind of experiencing something on that level for one of my first times, I was seeing or I was sensing family. I was seeing Blue Ivy running around the set. I was seeing Yvette, her, one of her dearest friends and publicist, just holding, embracing, and trusting in me. So feeling

• 52:00Speaker 01

  held in that way, Quacey, who were her creative director at the time, really letting me do my thing. And again, that idea, like I said, of there being no monitor on set and there just being my Polaroids and my film and the trust in that and the knowledge that this was going to be good and different and fresh for Vogue, that everyone was on the same page about that. And then I had done so much research before, lots of research.

• 52:21Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, the part you said at the end, like, you've talked a lot about that shoot, but I'm more fascinated in the era it ushered in, where places like Vogue, but. Also brands like Marc Jacobs and so many others asked you basically to do the Tyler Mitchell thing.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:39Sam Fragoso?

  So those companies by and large were owned, are owned and operated by white people. Asking you to do a very specific thing that was especially in vogue at that moment. I guess the pun was unintentional there, but yes. When the ask from a company though, like when the ask is in and of itself political, when they've made a calculation that it would be either culturally or politically advantageous to deviate from the white standard that they themselves were complicit in maintaining.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 53:13Sam Fragoso?

  How do you hold all of that as a young 20 something in a room with these people? Like, how do you hold that in the assignments that you do accept?

• 53:22Speaker 01

  You know that your aim and your goal and the result is more worth it than the issue at hand than those questions. You know in your heart that the images you will make, that the work that will be produced, that the body of work and that the legacy that will probably be appreciated much later. Sometimes in the moment, it's been amazing, the response in the moment for me, but sometimes also later is more worth it than than kind of those issues, which are, which are daunting and huge and a lot to hold. And you can ask any black artist and I think they would give a similar answer because that's not even a new idea. The things that, that black artists far more experienced than me have told me, they've

• 54:02Speaker 01

  heard collectors, patrons, commissioners say to their face, come out of their face and say to them have been, you know, beyond shocking and.

• 54:13Sam Fragoso?

  And in meetings, you didn't have anything like that?

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Of course I did. Why would it matter to my work in that way? Right? Like, of course it matters to me emotionally in that moment, but when you feel that the goal is bigger than something, do you get bogged down by the small stuff or not? It's that question.

• 54:29Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, let me ask you this. Was there ever an instance with the company? That they said one of those things to you that any renowned black artist could tell you, I've heard something like that from a company asking me for something or a collector. Did that ever happen to you and you said, this is too far?

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:49Sam Fragoso?

  I can't work with you. I cannot take the money.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've stepped away from things. You have to make that call. And usually that's when you're just like, this is not worth it, dealing with people who would say something like this or would do something like this, right?

• 55:02Sam Fragoso?

  But the reverse has to be true than I imagine. Like you've accepted things said that are not okay because it would pay for rent and you have to pay rent.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm human in that way, you know? And like, so have we all, right?

• 55:18Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, we all have.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  So, and so, and mine comes, like you said, with a particular calculation for the cultural or political optics. And of course, like, I know that, very well aware. And, but I do believe my work is great and it has something to say that is special first.

• 55:34Sam Fragoso?

  And even when you hadn't done a whole lot, you still knew my mission statement, the thing I am going for supersedes and is more important than the weird petty racial grievances of people of another generation.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Grievances or stereotypes, inaccuracies, the, you know, microaggressions, like all of it. Yeah.

• 55:58Sam Fragoso?

  The fact that you knew that at that age, like that you could hold on to that is maybe the most impressive thing to me. Like, the amount of people that, regardless of race, would buckle at that age in those rooms, I think is like amazing.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  It's something that I do think is a superpower of mine. I think it's the vision beyond what's immediately in the room, right? It's the vision beyond, it really is seeing and being like, no, no, this is actually bigger than both of us right now. And like, actually like this doesn't, this interaction is great and what, but you know, and even the relationship.

• 56:34Sam Fragoso?

  Or this interaction is not great.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Or this interaction is terrible, but however, however, re-center what the work is, what I'm, what I'm doing and what the project is.

• 56:43Sam Fragoso?

  Where do you think that superpower comes from?

• 56:46Speaker 01

  Well, maybe I'm still, I'm still in the process of like acknowledging it, you know? Um, but it has always been there and, and my mom is an unshakable person. She's someone who. But you know, her work is in corporate conference planning. She met my dad. She works with my dad in his small business, which hosts like workshops around financial consulting. And that's it's quite a small business, even though it sounds very fancy. Always felt far from my reality. But her profession, beyond just work and her as a person, the way she would talk to people was always putting aside petty things. It was always, whether it was a, whether it was someone she was talking to on the phone

• 57:28Speaker 01

  from Delta Airlines to just get a flight change and they were not wanting to be helpful that day. And she was like, no, we're gonna figure out this ticket. Like, I could see how she could talk to people and it would, it would basically be like, there was no real issue. There were no real barriers. Like, there was just what she saw she needed to get done. And the way she talked to people was always respectful. However, it was always letting them know, like, I'm not wavering from what I might need, what I'm coming to you for, what I'm asking from you, because that's what we need to do.

• 57:59Sam Fragoso?

  That is how the person who wrote, "Do not open this email," comes to be. That is how that person remains undaunted in rooms by people that are saying things that are completely objectionable and terrible. Like, I didn't know that about, I've known you for six years, didn't know this. I think I met you around once. Like, of course it's the call to Delta. You saw her be unflappable in the face of a customer service call to an airline. There is not a better testament to a human being than that.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  In fact, I learned it from her. I'll call her before I call the airline and say, now, what do you say?

• 58:37Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, what's the script?

• 58:40Speaker 01

  No, seriously.

• 58:40Sam Fragoso?

  That's so good. I'm so glad we had this on here. So here's an example of like, a test of you being unflappable, I think comes in 2021.

• 58:51Sam Fragoso?

  You do this cover shoot of then Vice President Kamala Harris. And you'd shoot a few different covers, one in print and one digital. And this, I think, is a pretty clear testing of your flappability. The internet had a lot of opinions. They had a lot of criticism about the way she was presented or the way she was captured and presented and the clothes she wore, which I believe she chose most of.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  All of.

• 59:22Sam Fragoso?

  All of. When that shoot happens and then comes out, how did you make sense of the response?

• 59:31Speaker 01

  I didn't. That was, that was me at my most flapped in an unflappable moment. In a series of unflappable moments, I was flapped. I was really low after it. And yeah, honestly, I was extremely honored to be asked to do this. I was extremely honored. She was very knowledgeable about my work. She was very grateful. I agreed to photograph her very, just, just really wonderful interaction with her personally, if I'm honest. And she saw what I was doing, particularly with the cover we're looking at here of her in front of the pink and green, the colors mimicking her, um, her sorority, AKA, which is a sorority that means so much to me in my own childhood and so much to so many black people around the country and around the world and people in general, but particularly what it means

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  for us, um, for an AKA to reach the White House in the way she has done is something I wanted to highlight. And so when this came out and the opinions started flying left and right, yes, I was very low. I was really, I think I even texted friends that I just want to think about stopping taking pictures, honestly.

• 1:00:34Sam Fragoso?

  Why was that?

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  I really, in the worst moments, let all of the feedback from people get to me and painted a narrative that I somehow did some wrongdoing, did her injustice, even though she saw and loved the photographs, that there was something I'd done that was wrong, that I'd, you know, and, and.

• 1:00:57Sam Fragoso?

  That you were at fault.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  That I was at fault.

• 1:00:59Sam Fragoso?

  That you had fallen short in a way that felt beyond like a photo not being good, but was like a dereliction of duty capturing the first black woman vice president.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I can talk about it so easily now because I can now see how ridiculous all that is. And I can really. Say with confidence that I do feel proud of that assignment and that and that every choice made by myself photographically, by her in terms of her clothes was what it was on that day and that the idea of perfection in that way is a false standard. Right? Or the or people's just ideas of a of a of a of a woman of color in general are always highly scrutinized, highly in in contest and never quite right for anyone.

• 1:01:43Sam Fragoso?

  Especially hers.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Especially hers. And so this is the way she wanted to present herself. This is the way I wanted to celebrate where she comes from. And this is the cover of Vogue and that's what it is. And

• 1:01:53Sam Fragoso?

  And the texts you send people.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was hard.

• 1:01:57Sam Fragoso?

  That was something you really thought.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really did. Yeah.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  I felt really low. Yeah, honestly. Terrible. I think I remember my skin breaking out, the worst it had ever broken out, like just all of it.

• 1:02:11Sam Fragoso?

  That's rare because your skin never breaks out.

• 1:02:14Sam Fragoso?

  I've never seen a pimple on this man once.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Include that, include that in this.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just, I did send some texts to some close friends where and one of my close friends, a hairstylist who I collaborate with a lot, was like, yeah, I don't want to see you reach that place because that was really negative. And when I heard that from him, I was like, it was only that perspective where I was like, oh, wow, I was really. That's true because if he's saying it, I know it's true.

• 1:02:38Sam Fragoso?

  You got to that conclusion because you thought what? You thought the people online were right? For context, you had done, you had the monograph had had come out by then. You had done so much excellent work that we have highlighted in this episode. So for one shoot to get to that place and go, I don't know if I want to do this anymore.

• 1:03:01Sam Fragoso?

  Like, what about the critique made you get there?

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  It wasn't so much the critique itself, but it was the reverberations of the critique in my head. You know, it was the narratives you tell yourself once the critiques come in. Because the critiques themselves have their own reasons for being there are, again, are about the contest of black women in our country, especially in politics and in the White House, and are about so many other things aside from and above me. Right? And like, and again, like you said, in other cases, the unflappability would be there. However, there was the reverberations of those critiques that I sat with that made me feel like I had decided to. That I had done something that I had, you know, and there was also so much contest in

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  America in general at that time in February of 2021, which were just after the January 6th moment. I think we were nine days after the January 6th moment when this cover hits magazine shelves. And so every hour is is something. And so I didn't take any of that into account when I just decided to start beating myself up, really.

• 1:04:09Sam Fragoso?

  And how do you begin to work yourself out of that period?

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  You just pick yourself up, really. You just get on with it and you just, you let time pass, you let things heal, you let the next issue go on to magazine shelves and you move on and you say, that was yesterday. And you rely on people who are close to you to pick you back up as well and make you feel empowered. And yeah, that year 2021, so that was a really hard year. Probably the first quarter of the year where I was really not seeing.

• 1:04:35Sam Fragoso?

  We hadn't left the house yet.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Was also that.

• 1:04:37Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  It was also like kind of a wave two of COVID. All of it by the summer was not resolved, but was being, was being patched up.

• 1:04:47Sam Fragoso?

  When we first sat down, you quoted Marcel Duchamp, is that what I said?

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:54Sam Fragoso?

  You quoted him in our conversation. And I have the full quote here that I wanted to read, especially in the context of what you're talking about.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:05:01Sam Fragoso?

  He said, "Society takes what it wants. The artist himself does not count because there's no actual existence for the work of art. The work of art is always based on the two poles of the onlooker and the maker. And the spark that comes from the bipolar action gives birth to something like electricity. But the onlooker has the last word, and it is always posterity that makes the masterpiece. The artist should not concern himself with this because it has nothing to do with them."

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  I love that quote. I love that whole part where he talks about like two poles. And the artist just, at that point, it's not about them. It's not about me. It's above me at that point. Duchamp's good. At that point in time, I think it was later in his life, he had a lot more perspective than he probably had earlier as well. And like, it was when he was in his wisdom era and he was just like giving the quotes that like all artists need to read in here.

• 1:05:57Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:58Sam Fragoso?

  So as we wrap our way back around to where we started in Ghost Images, you're 29, about to be 30. There was a producer you worked with, a talented man who has since come under some scrutiny since you worked with him. But he said to you, your twenties are for getting ahead.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:21Sam Fragoso?

  I'm thinking about your thirties as we wrap our way back around to this new exhibit. What do you think your thirties are for?

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  Stay in your head. No, I'm just kidding.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  I think, I mean, no, honestly, that, that, that's my joke in jest. The reality for me, and the first thing that came to my head was by sitting in who you are, really. I think my thirties are, and as trite as that sounds, I hope if I'm doing well by, by thirty nine, by ten years from now, I'll have really been sitting deeper into who I am. And what that means is having more of a comfort with the way things are, the creativity, the specifics of my own projects, not necessarily striving outwardly as hard as one does in their twenties when they've got a lot to prove.

• 1:07:07Sam Fragoso?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  But sitting back and making comfortable, confident things that hopefully have a stroke of genius in them or not, you know? And I think, again, the creative project for me, I've made clear is like a lifelong journey. And I'm definitely just getting started, even though I feel I've done a lot in nearly ten years. I think the thirties are about in sitting back more comfortably.

• 1:07:29Sam Fragoso?

  Cause your twenties weren't comfortable.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  No, and I, I actually do wanna contest that idea that like, there has to be something to push back against for something to be great and like.

• 1:07:39Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, do you have to sleep on the floor in London?

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, all the time. And, and there are some people who I think really do get off on that pursuit. They like need a struggle. If they're up, they wanna get back down again to prove that they can go back up or whatever it is, you know? I have a vision of myself that's a lot more consistent than that. That is really, I don't wanna say self possessed, but that is very, um, self assured. I see that for myself because I think that is where the comfort in which you can like, explore, play, navigate, feel certain in those specific interests, those weird nerdy interests that you're into and let that shine through in the work. And I think when the work gets more specific and truly weirder, that comes from a place of confidence.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  It doesn't come from a place of shakeability and, uh, I need this now, you know, like.

• 1:08:28Sam Fragoso?

  What about the, the industry at large? Like so much of your work and so much of the journalism that was. Written about your work and the profiles of you talked about the radical nature of your photographs, how it was upending these white, traditionally white male systems, that it was changing of these organizations and who they hired and why they hired them and what they wanted images to look like. And you said in 2022, coming off making a lot of my fashion work, you said this to the New York Times, you said, coming off making a lot of my fashion work, which had this signature of optimism. I want to continue that, but also think through the ways the land hasn't held up its promise.

• 1:09:13Sam Fragoso?

  I'm thinking about 40 acres and a mule. I'm thinking about even the past two years in which systems have not worked out for black folks. Now that we're in this new exhibit of yours at the Gagosian in the year 2025, where does that land with you? Like, how are you thinking about these, these bigger structural forces?

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  Look, I mean, I wanna, yeah, no, I, I, I mean,

• 1:09:39Sam Fragoso?

  It sounds like you're about to run for office.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  What I, what I want to get to and the place of enlightenment that is for myself and really not for anyone else is like, if within my work for myself and for people who look at it, they can go beyond seeing these things as binaries, right? Is it about optimism? Is it about death, right? Is it about, is it about trauma? Is it about transcendence, right? Those are the binaries often set up for not only image makers, but especially black image makers and black artists. The work will go to a great place if it can include all of those realities, which are parts of our experience and transcend those things, go beyond them and not sort of set up that dichotomy as something that is purely binary. That's where I hope it heads. That's what I'm thinking about now.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  That's, and that's kind of why I said that quote in 2022 is I think I was, I was headed there. And I have no issue with having that moniker of like being the sort of, yeah, chronicler of joy in a certain way. I mean, there is, there is an extremely important place in art for joy and for wonder. It gives me that feeling. And so therefore I want to create those feelings in my own work. But if I can, as I said earlier, complicate that idea. The work will be getting better.

• 1:10:51Sam Fragoso?

  It can just be art.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it can also just be great, and it can also inspire others, but without being didactic or having that outward, direct aim towards progress in quotation marks, you know? What that might mean, I haven't seen quite yet, but if I can, if at thirty nine or if at forty nine, I am still having a creative practice where I'm making things that truly scare me a little, I would consider that progress for myself.

• 1:11:17Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm. Before we go.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:19Sam Fragoso?

  I want to look at three pieces that you made after that moment in twenty twenty one, where you said, I don't know if I'm gonna take photos anymore.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:30Sam Fragoso?

  This is called the Riverside Scene. You shot it in twenty twenty one. Why do you think people ask about it?

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  That I couldn't tell you, but that thunderous response to such a photograph is something that really signals it lands with people on many, many levels. When a photograph, which we experience photographs all the time, still four years later, I'm hearing that people would love to see it, would love to acquire it. Where is it? How do I? It's so great. Like, will it be in this show? Could it come to our museum?

• 1:12:00Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. Well, how did it come to be?

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Came to be in Atlanta, Georgia, but it came to be in the summer or fall of twenty twenty one, where I was missing home because of that second wave of COVID. Had not been back since the beginning of the pandemic and was just yearning to make images in which there was a whole cornucopia, really, of not only togetherness, black togetherness, but creative possibility, wonder, expanse, and yeah, engagement with that his, that old good history of the pastoral and painting and in art. And I think it covers a lot of that, those topics and that ground in one image.

• 1:12:38Sam Fragoso?

  Can you imagine if you didn't take that? If you listen to Twitter or X?

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:45Sam Fragoso?

  This is like unbelievable. Can you fucking imagine if you let them win?

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that would have, that would have been like trash.

• 1:12:53Sam Fragoso?

  As the first girl you had a crush on would say, that would not be it.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  That would not be it. That would not be it.

• 1:13:01Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, let's look at two more. This next one is the Cumberland Island tableau. That's part of Ghost Images, this most recent show of yours at the Gagosian. Where does it land with you?

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  For me, it feels like a more evolved version of Riverside Scene. I mean, the tableau is an idea I return back to, but always looking to strike my own little recipe of it in photography. Like, there are many artists who have taken on the tableau and photography in a great way. Jeff Wall, Gersky, even Dina Lawson. But I'm finding my own recipe of togetherness, tenderness, a delicate ephemerality. I think that I feel more here than I do even in Riverside Scene, which is very assured, very colorful, very exuberant. This one feels ephemeral, like it could slip between your fingers, like the way the sand and the texture could almost slip between your fingers. The delicate touch and the reflection on the pond with the young boy on the left's hands.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  The touch between mother and daughter at the top of the hill and the blade of grass being reached up towards the sky by the young boy. Like, each gesture feels like you couldn't have made it up and did unfold in front of my camera, but also.

• 1:14:10Sam Fragoso?

  That's not directed?

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  They're what I like to call loosely staged, meaning we go, we go to a place, I've looked, I've checked a place out, I have a picture in mind. Or I'm dreaming of a picture, but also I let real familial relationships unfold, where people talk to one another, where they play, where I look for a moment and stand back. And it's that mixture of directing without result directing, which is that thing we talked about. And like, just letting it, letting it happen a little bit, but also trying to help, like having a story in mind.

• 1:14:38Sam Fragoso?

  But directing is something you want to do. It's where your first love came from, was directing those skate videos. And I'm gonna do what, as you heard, Richard Linklater and Francis Ford Coppola did to me on the podcast. I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to pose it to you now. As you approach 30. What is stopping you from doing the thing you know you want to do?

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  Some difficult mixture of genuinely things going very well in my photography and in my art. Like genuinely, there just being like busyness. And maybe that's also exactly the thing I tell myself to avoid doing that thing.

• 1:15:21Sam Fragoso?

  By things going well, you mean this upcoming thing for the Met Gala?

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like there being real like amazing projects that I would not walk away from for anything and to make a movie. And yet definitely feel deeply called and I'm very clear and to you as a friend, but also to yeah, in in many public, you know, moments of being interviewed about my desire to make movies. And I think it will happen in my 30s and it's also probably partially about getting over a certain level of fear. And yeah, if I can also be open, like I talked to our mutual friend, Janix Bravo about this a lot. We're like, I, I know I can do it. I like beyond know I can do it. However, sometimes I text her and I'm like, my, my friend, like my, my more experienced friend, how do I do it?

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  You know, and then she will give me a challenge of like, well, write, write three movies from history that you would have loved to have made and write down 10 movies from the last 10 years that you would, you would have loved to have a stab at. Start there, go from there. And that's like where the real soul searching kind of starts.

• 1:16:28Sam Fragoso?

  And when she's given you that advice, have you taken it?

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, a lot of them are movies that probably wouldn't even do, do well like commercially. Cachet.

• 1:16:38Sam Fragoso?

  Uh huh.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  Hankey.

• 1:16:39Sam Fragoso?

  Uh huh.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  I mean, the foundation, the movie that made me want to make movies is, you know, for better and for worse, for all of its sort of tropiness, Now the Master by Paul Thomas Anderson. And Social Network, another bona fide classic, The Favorite. I love auteur driven dramas with attitude, like that's what I like. And when they're about specific histories or specific stories, and that's what all those do. And also a wild card, The Music Room.

• 1:17:05Sam Fragoso?

  You said that you know that you can do the job.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:08Sam Fragoso?

  So the fear is not about talent.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:17:11Sam Fragoso?

  What is the fear then?

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  I think it's envisioning the path and the road by which I get there. I think it's like the steps between now and like actually like making the thing. Because once I'm off to the races, like the thing is gonna be great. And it's just like wanting to find my pocket of collaborators in the way that I want. That feels right for me.

• 1:17:33Sam Fragoso?

  I thought you may say something like that.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:36Sam Fragoso?

  And so I've pulled something for you, which was one of the first interviews you ever did. It was on Tumblr back in 2015.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  Okay, well.

• 1:17:44Sam Fragoso?

  Here's the photo they took of you.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:17:47Sam Fragoso?

  And here is a question they asked you, and then I'm gonna let you read the question and answer to.

• 1:17:54Sam Fragoso?

  This is almost exactly a decade ago.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Okay, so last question. What is the best advice you can give to the kids who have similar dreams as you? I'm laughing because I've already seen the answer.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  In all caps, fucking start doing it. I don't care if it's bad. Not everything you make is going to be good. People have this notion that they can't start something creative if it doesn't fit in on Instagram. Just make some shit for you. You'll find something you and others will fuck with. Mic drop. That was all in caps, by the way.

• 1:18:26Sam Fragoso?

  All in caps.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  So, and you as someone who I would say is in my sort of Los Angeles constituency of community have probably said that to me one too many times.

• 1:18:40Sam Fragoso?

  This is a rare time where I'm not saying it.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  You're just reading what I said.

• 1:18:44Sam Fragoso?

  You're saying it to you.

• 1:18:48Sam Fragoso?

  I've done nothing but present the materials.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It has that, yeah. Wasn't you at all.

• 1:18:54Sam Fragoso?

  I, I didn't weirdly construct this conversation to go this way towards the end. It's kind of amazing.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And yes, I think the thirty, I think my thirties, what I've really thought about as I enter them is that that will happen.

• 1:19:11Sam Fragoso?

  When you look at those words now, do you think fondly of that kid? And do you think you'll be able in your thirties to listen to the advice that you yourself were giving kids at that time?

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. I do. I definitely do. And I am fond of him because.

• 1:19:27Sam Fragoso?

  Because he writes in all caps?

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  Because he writes in all caps and he would have put it in different colors if he could have. And.

• 1:19:33Sam Fragoso?

  Do not open this.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  Don't open. And he also, his naivety really worked to his advantage. The learning in public thing is something that I really recommend for everyone. And that's what, that's what he did for the last 10 years and that's, and then the next 10 will be different. But that's only as a result of the previous 10. So.

• 1:19:54Sam Fragoso?

  Naivete. It goes a long way. It's like, why you sent those emails in different colors and font sizes, why I sent cold emails to editors that did not know who the hell I was. And it does remind me of, of that, like, passage from like back in 1940s, when Citizen Kane came out. And I talked about it with Ramel, but you know, Orson Welles was always asked like, how did he have the confidence to direct his first movie? Like, how did he, how did he do that? And he said, quote, ignorance, sheer ignorance. There is no confidence equal to it.

• 1:20:34Sam Fragoso?

  And so as we go, I hope you can find and lean into some of that ignorance. Although I don't think you have that much of it. But whatever naivete you can hold in your thirties, frankly, I'm saying this for myself as well.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:50Sam Fragoso?

  Um, I hope we can do that.

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:52Sam Fragoso?

  Together and separately.

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:54Sam Fragoso?

  I wish that for us and I wish that for you.

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  It would mean we're doing something right.

• 1:20:59Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, I think so. Tyler Mitchell, congratulations on the new show.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:21:04Sam Fragoso?

  And I'll see you in another five years.

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  Yep. Our five year check in.

• 1:21:08Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. I mean, on the podcast.

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  Won't talk to you till then.

• 1:21:10Sam Fragoso?

  That would be incredible. The end of the friendship.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:14Sam Fragoso?

  Take care.

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 1:22:18Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. Special thanks to the team at The Gagosian, Antoine Sargent, and of course, our guest, Tyler Mitchell. His debut solo photography exhibition, Ghost Images, is now available to view in New York City at The Gagosian. You can check out some of the selected works we spoke about today on the show on our website at talkeasypod.com. For more episodes like this one, I'd recommend Joel Meyerowitz, Marina Abramovic, and Hilton Ailes. To hear those and more Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. You can also subscribe to Lemonada Premium for bonus content.

• 1:23:02Sam Fragoso?

  Just hit the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or head to lemonadapremium.com. If you want to drop us a line, whether it's feedback, a guest suggestion, just reflections on an episode, you can reach me at [email protected]. That's [email protected]. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Janix Bravo. Today's talk was edited by Matt Sasaki and mixed by Andrew Vastola, who was taped out of City Box in New York City. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Kresha Shanoy. Photographs today come from Sarah Schneider. Research from Ben Eisen.

• 1:23:47Sam Fragoso?

  This episode was made in partnership with the good people at Lemonada Media. I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next Sunday with a brand new episode. Until then, stay safe and so long.

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  History gets written, then rewritten, sometimes by scholars correcting the record, sometimes by committees deciding what a generation of kids will and won't learn. The version that makes it into the textbook isn't always the only story. It's the one that won out. That's the kind of thing Ground News was built for. It shows you how outlets across the spectrum tell the same story, side by side, so you can spot the shading for yourself. Ground News gives each outlet a factuality rating, so you know how much weight to give the source, and shows you who owns it, so you know what's behind it. The Nobel Peace Center called it "an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers,

• 1:24:52Speaker 02

  and expand your worldview." So go to groundnews.com/rz. That's G-R-O-U-N-D-N-E-W-S.com/rz for 40% off unlimited access vantage plan. Get it yourself or gift it to someone who'd rather know than not. Use my link, groundnews.com/rz, so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you're a fan of learning all sides of history, then Ground News is for you. One more time, groundnews.com/rz.

• 1:25:28Speaker 03

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

• 1:25:36Speaker 04

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 1:25:40Speaker 03

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 1:25:42Speaker 04

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 1:25:45Speaker 03

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 1:25:49Speaker 04

  That's it.

• 1:25:51Speaker 03

  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be.