| | | |  | | | | Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Red Steps), 2016. © Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery | | | | | | Wish This Was Real | | | Sport in Focus | | | | Collections of the Olympic Museum and the Photo Elysée | | | | | | | 28 March – 17 August 2025 | | | | Opening: Thursday 27 March 2025 6pm | | |  | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | |  | | | Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Topanga II), 2017.
© Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery | | | | | | Wish This Was Real | | | | 28 March – 17 August 2025 | | | | Opening: Thursday 27 March 2025 6pm | | | | American photographer Tyler Mitchell is driven by dreams of paradise against the backdrop of history. Since his rise to prominence in the world of fashion, Mitchell has propelled a visual narrative of beauty, style, utopia, and the landscape that expands visions of Black life. Photo Elysée presents Mitchell’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland, 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. | | | | | |  | | | Tyler Mitchell, Albany, Georgia, 2021.
© Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery | | | | | | Wish This Was Real explores Mitchell’s work, from his early portraits and videos that pursue dreams of leisure and self-expression to his elaborate landscapes that revel in visions of paradise underscored by the complexities of history and social identity in the United States. Central to the exhibition is a display featuring photography and mixed-media sculptures by artists whose work deeply resonates with Mitchell’s own creative lineage, such as Rashid Johnson, Gordon Parks, and Carrie Mae Weems, a unique intergenerational dialogue that sets Mitchell’s photography within a wide spectrum of visual experimentation and intellectual heritage.
Wish This Was Real is curated by Brendan Embser and Sophia Greiff and is produced by the C/O Berlin Foundation. | | | | | |  | | | Tyler Mitchell. Untitled (Sisters on the Block), 2021.
© Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery | | | | | | Tyler Mitchell (b. 1995, USA) is a Brooklyn-based artist, photographer, and filmmaker. He received a bachelor of arts in film and television from New York University Tisch School of the Arts in 2017. Mitchell’s work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Brooklyn Museum; Detroit Institute of the Arts; FOAM Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Pizzuti Collection of Columbus Museum of Art; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; and Cleveland Museum of Art.
In 2018 Mitchell was commissioned to photograph Beyoncé for American Vogue’s September issue, making history, at the age of twenty-three, as the first Black photographer to shoot the magazine’s cover. Mitchell’s photography has also been published widely in magazines, including Aperture, Dazed, i-D, Interview, M Le Monde, Vanity Fair, American and British Vogue, W, WSJ, and Zeit Magazin. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world: The New Black Vanguard (Aperture Gallery, New York); I Can Make You Feel Good (FOAM, Amsterdam, and International Center of Photography, New York); Social Works II and Chrysalis (Gagosian Gallery, London); and Domestic Imaginaries (SCAD Gallery, Savannah, Georgia). | | | | | |  | | | Tyler Mitchell, Motherlan Skating, 2019.
© Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery | | | | | | | After being presented in Berlin and Helsinki in 2024, Wish This Was Real is making a stopover at Photo Elysée before its presentation in Paris in autumn 2025. | | |
| | | | | | | | | |  | | | Hélène Tobler.
Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, Men's Hockey
China (CHN) 11th - South Africa (RSA) 12th, detail of a player
© 2008_Comité International Olympique (CIO) | | | Sport in Focus | | | | Collections of the Olympic Museum and the Photo Elysée | | | | | | | 28 March – 17 August 2025 | | | | For over a century, major sporting events have been accompanied by images. With the boom in amateur photography in the late 19th century, coinciding with the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, photography and sport have, in many ways, evolved together. This exhibition reveals the vast photographic collections of the Olympic Museum and Photo Elysée. The exhibition, which was unveiled at the Rencontres d'Arles for the Paris 2024 Games, explores a largely untold photographic heritage, offering us a narrative that shines the spotlight on sports photography. | | | | | |  | | | Melbourne 1956 Olympic-Games-Athletics 110m-hurdles
SHANKLE Joel USA 3rd, DAVIS Jack USA 2nd, CALHOUN Lee USA 1st.
© 1956 Comite International Olympique CIO | | | | | | | The visibility given to sports events necessarily involves photographic imagery. Pursuing performance, combining effort with gesture, the practice of sports follows precise rules and is showcased when performed for competition. The staging of sports is relayed by photographers who position themselves around the stadium. | | | | | |  | | | Jeux Olympiques Tokyo 2020, Plongeon,
haut vol 10m Femmes - Qualifications, Nikita HAINS (AUS)
© 2021 / Comité International Olympique (CIO) / HUET, John | | | | | | By exploring a largely unpublished photographic heritage, the exhibition reveals the visual grammar of sports photography through several themes: the mediatization that began in Athens in 1896; the technique that seeks to capture movement through freeze frames; the composition that influences visual narration and constructs the celebration of sports; the figures that take place in the stadium where athletes face a crowd gripped with emotions; and the photographers who use sports photography as pure documentation of achievement and others as an artistic means. The numerous focuses offer us a narrative that highlights sports photography and the Olympic Games in particular.
Photo Elysée houses unique collections of more than 1,200,000 phototypes covering the entire spectrum of photographic art in all its dimensions – historical, aesthetic, technical, social and cultural – from the earliest processes dating back to the 1840s through to today’s digital images. | | | | | |  | | | Lothar Jeck. High Jump, 1936.
Courtesy of the artist / Photo Elysée / Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt. | | | | | | unsubscribe here
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