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8 COLUMN FASHION Untitled (Boys of Walthamstow) from I Can Make You Feel Good (2020) Untitled (Hat) from I Can Make You Feel Good (2020) I Can Make You Feel Good, the début monograph by the American photographer Tyler Mitchell, was published at the height of the global lockdown in 2020. Its heady mix of visual nostalgia, youthful nonchalance and unfettered fun is generated through simple images of friends, models and collaborators hanging out – casually sitting or walking, lying and sleeping, enjoying the pleasures of picnicking, flying kites, hula-hooping and simply just being together – in what looks like the intoxicating blaze of summer. Some images hint at narratives, others feel like portraiture and a documentary realism is never far away. They appear alert to the past but are clearly contemporary in terms of their construction of time and space. All the images in the book are shot through with a wonderful naturalness and consistency both technically and conceptually. As a collection their dreamy state evokes comfort much like the mood in the American R&B group Shalamar’s hit single of the same title (from their platinumselling 1982 album Friends) to which Mitchell makes a knowing nod: ‘Now I truly believe / All the money in the world / Can’t comfort you the way I wrap my arms around you / And I’ll always be there / Baby, I can make you feel good.’ Yet, to assume Mitchell’s imagery is the embodiment of some sort of carefree attitude and exists in a vacuum at a remove from the issues that have reached boiling point in our age of anxiety (endemic racism; police brutality; political populism; climate crisis; pandemic) is mistaken. These images are not candy coloured confections but rather a critical intervention that speaks directly to our historical moment. Mitchell’s riff on the cool soul music of Shalamar’s Friends is far from incidental. Type ‘Friends’ into any search engine on the internet and from the billions of results the first will be not Shalamar but the enduringlypopular American tv sitcom Friends that ran from 1994 to 2004. Friends, much like Mitchell’s photographs, is a kind of chronicle of the everyday, the domestic, the ordinary and the unexceptional in the lives of an ensemble cast who seem to be at home just hanging out, just having fun. Yet what is most striking when looking at Friends now is just how white it was. Its astounding lack of racial diversity (accompanied by heavy doses of sleazy machismo, sexism and the surveillance of women’s bodies, as well as often nauseating jokes at the expense of lesbians, gay men and transwomen) was far from exceptional. As a young black person growing up in the 1990s and 2000s what did the products of popular culture, such as Friends, reflect back to you? In suggesting your life was invisible, your world erased, such a lack of inclusion actually exposed just how central such seemingly innocuous visual representations are to the global mechanisms of systemic racism. In the Preface to his book Mitchell states, ‘I often think about what white fun looks like and this notion that Black people can’t have the same… My work comes from a place of BLACK UTOPIA
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JOSEPH MCBRINN 9 Beyoncé photographed for American Vogue (2018) wanting to push back against this lack. I feel an urgency to create a body of images where Black people are visualized as free, expressive, effortless, and sensitive.’ The images that make up Mitchell’s book are full of optimism and hope, what he calls the visualisation of ‘a Black utopia’ in which photography’s capacity to envisage the present for the better is used to address centuries of misrepresentation and effacement. One of the most compelling images in Mitchell’s book is Untitled (Boys of Walthamstow), used on the cover, which shows a group of young black boys hanging out in the Walthamstow marshes at the far edge of London’s East End. As an image of nascent masculinity, it speaks of tenderness, friendship, vulnerability even. Mitchell says he aims to approach his subject with an ‘honest gaze’ rejecting the ‘thingification’ of the black body in how it is sexualised and anonymised in the networks of popular consumption. Mitchell like many photographers his age (he was born in 1995) started sharing his work via social media, largely through Instagram, and amidst a sea of fakery and simulacra they were instantly recognised for their sensitivity, authenticity and humanity. By working within the arena of fashion, where we expect image manipulation and the hard sell, he injects an emotional honestly that is often unexpected. The critic Antwaun Sargent has described Mitchell’s work as ‘an exploration of youthfulness and the black male beauty that renegotiates definitions of masculinity’ as it presents black youth in ways it is rarely shown. Such images brought to my mind the comment by bell hooks that the discourse around masculinity largely presumes a white subject and ‘never assumes the existence of black men whose creative agency has enabled them to subvert norms and develop ways of thinking about masculinity that challenge patriarchy.’ Precedents to I Can Make You Feel Good from Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) to Ryan McGinley’s The kids were alright (2017) in their attempt to capture a zeitgeist youth culture (albeit a largely white one), however, often feel a little overstated (Mitchell openly acknowledges such sources). A feeling for the lived experience of youth has been consistent in much of Mitchell’s earlier work. For instance, when still a student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts he travelled to Cuba to document Havana’s skateboarding culture (self-published as El Paquette in 2015) and not long after he graduated he shot a cover of Teen Vogue on gun reform focusing on a generation of teenage survivors and activists. Since then he has shot campaigns for Loewe, Comme des Garçons and Marc Jacobs as well as editorials for magazines such as i-D, Dazed, Document, Office and Fader. In 2018, Mitchell was the first African American photographer to shoot the cover of American Vogue in its 126-year history. His image of Beyoncé regal and resplendent in a floral headdress (by Phil John Perry for Rebel Rebel) graced the cover of the September issue. In The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (2019) Antwaun Sargent argues that Mitchell is part of a new generation of photographers working at the intersection of art and fashion who desire to widen the representation of black lives. Here they have found a space to explore the politics of representation and circumvent historic discrimination by re-focusing attention on ‘issues of race, beauty and sexuality.’ In Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time (2019) Mark Sealy suggests that ‘race is a construct and photography has been mostly applied to aid the creation of a Eurocentric symbolic order in which the subaltern has been condemned as an object, rendered and processed as a mute and inferior being.’ Mitchell has said the representation of ‘black beauty is an act of justice’ and as such his photographs perform what Sealy has termed ‘critical and ongoing work.’ — Joseph McBrinn THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF YOUTH

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FASHION

Untitled (Boys of Walthamstow) from I Can Make You Feel Good (2020)

Untitled (Hat) from I Can Make You Feel Good (2020)

I Can Make You Feel Good, the début monograph by the American photographer Tyler Mitchell, was published at the height of the global lockdown in 2020. Its heady mix of visual nostalgia, youthful nonchalance and unfettered fun is generated through simple images of friends, models and collaborators hanging out – casually sitting or walking, lying and sleeping, enjoying the pleasures of picnicking, flying kites, hula-hooping and simply just being together – in what looks like the intoxicating blaze of summer. Some images hint at narratives, others feel like portraiture and a documentary realism is never far away. They appear alert to the past but are clearly contemporary in terms of their construction of time and space. All the images in the book are shot through with a wonderful naturalness and consistency both technically and conceptually. As a collection their dreamy state evokes comfort much like the mood in the American R&B group Shalamar’s hit single of the same title (from their platinumselling 1982 album Friends) to which Mitchell makes a knowing nod: ‘Now I truly believe / All the money in the world / Can’t comfort you the way I wrap my arms around you / And I’ll always be there / Baby, I can make you feel good.’ Yet, to assume Mitchell’s imagery is the embodiment of some sort of carefree attitude and exists in a vacuum at a remove from the issues that have reached boiling point in our age of anxiety (endemic racism; police brutality; political populism; climate crisis; pandemic) is mistaken. These images are not candy coloured confections but rather a critical intervention that speaks directly to our historical moment. Mitchell’s riff on the cool soul music of Shalamar’s Friends is far from incidental. Type ‘Friends’ into any search engine on the internet and from the billions of results the first will be not Shalamar but the enduringlypopular American tv sitcom Friends that ran from 1994 to 2004. Friends, much like Mitchell’s photographs, is a kind of chronicle of the everyday, the domestic, the ordinary and the unexceptional in the lives of an ensemble cast who seem to be at home just hanging out, just having fun. Yet what is most striking when looking at Friends now is just how white it was. Its astounding lack of racial diversity (accompanied by heavy doses of sleazy machismo, sexism and the surveillance of women’s bodies, as well as often nauseating jokes at the expense of lesbians, gay men and transwomen) was far from exceptional. As a young black person growing up in the 1990s and 2000s what did the products of popular culture, such as Friends, reflect back to you? In suggesting your life was invisible, your world erased, such a lack of inclusion actually exposed just how central such seemingly innocuous visual representations are to the global mechanisms of systemic racism. In the Preface to his book Mitchell states, ‘I often think about what white fun looks like and this notion that Black people can’t have the same… My work comes from a place of

BLACK UTOPIA

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