Performances by Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy Allen White may be the main dishes on the newly released fourth season of The Bear, but in one episode, there’s also a side of art, courtesy the photographer Tyler Mitchell.
The fourth episode features two of Mitchell’s photographs hanging in the Chicago apartment rented by Syd, Edebiri’s character.
In one of those pictures, there are multiple shots of a Black man and a Black woman dancing in an empty room. Those photographs were initially shot by Mitchell on commission for Vogue and feature the actors KiKi Layne and Stephan James, who starred together in the Barry Jenkins film If Beale Street Could Talk. Arranged together in grid, the shots form a single work called Untitled (Kiki and Stephan Dancing).
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In another photograph, rows of Black girls and boys can be seen hula hooping on a concrete court in Brooklyn. Though it appears to be a documentary photograph, that 2019 picture, Untitled (Group Hula Hoop), was Mitchell’s attempt at adding to “the conversations that I and other black artists around me want to have,” the artist told the Guardian in 2020. “All the pictures propose what our world should look like—if we are allowed all the freedoms we have been historically denied.”
A recurrent subject in his work has been intimate moments that might seem minor or unimportant. But in immortalizing these moments, Mitchell intends to make them feel monumental.
As Mitchell told painter Amy Sherald in a 2021 conversation for Art in America, he is “out to reclaim these small moments of everyday joy, which is so important because generations before us weren’t necessarily able to.”
His subject matter is consonant with the focus of this episode of The Bear. Directed by Janicza Bravo, it centers around Syd’s attempts to reconnect with her cousin Chantel (Danielle Deadwyler) and her cousin’s daughter, TJ (Arion King). Much of the episode is devoted to anything other than the FX on Hulu series’ main subject, the cutthroat food industry in Chicago, with a large part of the episode’s runtime given over to quotidian conversations about Hamburger Helper and friendship.
Before he even turned 30, Mitchell rose to fame for shooting Beyoncé’s portrait and has since risen to become one of today’s mostly closely watched photographers, working on commission for brands such as Ferragamo, Gucci, and JW Anderson. He is now represented by Gagosian, which is among the biggest galleries in the world.
His prices have ascended alongside his fame, with one photograph selling for more than $24,000 at Phillips. For that reason, it’s not exactly clear how Syd, an underpaid chef now at the helm of a struggling restaurant, could possibly afford two, let alone one, of Mitchell’s photographs.
But Mitchell seemed to give The Bear his stamp of approval, posting a screenshot of the episode of his Instagram Story over the weekend with three heart emojis. He did, however, quibble with Sydney’s unconventional installation methods, noting the way that she had arranged his two photographs inches away from each other. With a crying emoji, Mitchell added, “Sydney got her framing aesthetics but so be it.”