The Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers & Gordon Parks
in ‘Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real’, Photo Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland
28 March – 18 August 2025
Loretta Pettway Bennett, Work-clothes strips, 2003 © Loretta Pettway Bennett / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London
Since the American photographer’s rise to prominence in the world of fashion, Tyler Mitchell has propelled a visual landscape that expands visions of Black life. Photo Elysée presents Mitchell’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland, travelling from C/O Berlin, offering new perspectives on his longstanding themes of self-determination and the extraordinary radiance of the everyday, and showing how photography can be rooted in the past while evoking imagined futures.
Central to the exhibition is a display entitled ‘Altars/Acres’, featuring photography and mixed media sculptures by artists whose work deeply resonates with Mitchell’s practice, such as Loretta Pettway Bennett of the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, Gordon Parks, Garrett Bradley, Grace Wales Bonner, and Carrie Maw Weems. This unique intergenerational dialogue sets Mitchell’s photography within a wide spectrum of experimentation, intellectual heritage, and cultural expression.