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Tyler Mitchell

Age 22

Hometown Atlanta

Now Lives In a one-bedroom apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, where he is still unpacking boxes. “My life is a mess right now — a really good mess,” he said.

Mr. Mitchell handles color prints he handmade from photographs taken of skateboarders during his second trip to Cuba.CreditJoshua Aronson for The New York Times

Claim to Fame Though he just graduated from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in September, Mr. Mitchell, a photographer and video director, has already worked with acclaimed talents including the cerebral rapper Kevin Abstract and Marc Jacobs. Mr. Mitchell’s color-saturated images probe the intersections of youth culture and racial identity. “I depict black people and people of color in a really real and pure way,” he said. “There is an honest gaze to my photos.”

Big Break In 2015, Mr. Mitchell spent six weeks in Cuba as part of a documentary photography program, where he captured Havana’s vibrant skateboard scene and crumbling architecture. He self-published the resulting photos in a 108-page book, “El Paquete,” which drew notice from Dazed Digital and i-D magazine, and sold out its run at Dashwood Books.

Latest Project Mr. Mitchell may have been an “early adopter of using Instagram as a community tool” (he has 36,500 followers), but his focus these days is on print platforms like The Fader and Office Magazine. “I think magazines are a great way to be like, ‘This is important enough to be published on the printed page,’” he said.

Next Thing He is currently editing an experimental three-screen film he shot using a 35 millimeter camera, about “race and how that affects adolescents” that he plans to screen in New York sometime next year. While he is tight-lipped about the film’s story line, he said the project will be more personal than his online persona. “I got so much exposure through the internet, so I think it’s about switching those initial statements into real-life experiences,” he said.

Black Eagle An esoteric autobiographical short film he directed and starred in for American Eagle had its premiere in February. “I do look at myself as a black American and equally as a symbol at the center of this country,” he said. “I had never considered myself an American Eagle model, but what made it interesting was to twist the cultural conversation about what the brand stands for and turn it on its head.”