‘I cried 3 times this morning’ -Black photographer Tyler Mitchell who shot Beyonce’s Vogue cover

Tyler Mitchell, the 23-year-old black photographer who shot Beyonce’s Vogue cover, has shared how he feels following the positive attention he has gotten so far.

Tyler Mitchell who made history after he became the first African American photographer to shoot a Vogue cover in it’s 126-year history, took to Twitter to reveal that he cried 3 times after the release of Beyonce’s Vogue cover which has been trending since yesterday.

He wrote on Twitter;

I cried 3 times already this morning. Here’s Beyonce by me for the September 2018 cover of American Vogue.

An article from @BoF  explaining the leaks and rumors around our shoot. The truth is Raul Martinez and Anna Wintour proposed and hired me for the Vogue shoot and Beyoncé quickly agreed.

Hi if ur new here I did this unrepresented. Fully solo just manifesting dreams. Thanks for giving a fuck. Excited to keep pushing forward

Tyler Mitchell—who captured Beyoncé for this month’s issue—has an entirely different story: His love of images was sparked on the wheels of his first skateboard.

“Of course there’s the surface-level cool and rebel spirit about skateboarding,” says Mitchell, “but the thing that makes skaters like artists runs deeper than that: It’s not a sport that’s built on competition, it’s one that thrives on community.”

With the help of skater friends in Marietta, the Atlanta suburb where he grew up, Mitchell saved up to buy his first camera—a Digital SLR Canon—in ninth grade. Inspired by the dreamy aesthetic of Spike Jonze’s early skate videos, he set about teaching himself to make his own, with the help of online tutorials.

“I’m definitely a YouTube-generation kid,” says Mitchell. “I learned how to make movies and how to edit that way. I quickly formed my point of view.”

On the path becoming a celebrity Vogue photographer, this was clearly a ramp less traveled. At just 23, Tyler Mitchell is among the youngest photographers to have shot the cover of Vogue; Irving Penn was 26 when his first image appeared on the cover, in 1943; swinging-sixties documentarian David Bailey was also 23. Rather than apprentice with an established fashion photographer, as many of his peers do, Mitchell got his start shooting music videos for the likes of indie rapper Kevin Abstract when he was still a freshman in film school.

Instead of signing with a creative agent, he made a name curating his portfolio on Instagram, posting the photographs he was commissioned to shoot for such brands as Marc Jacobs, Converse, and this magazine. Alongside these commercial projects were others that would eventually find a home on art-gallery walls (Red Hook Labs, Aperture), including I’m Doing Pretty Hood in My Pink Polo, his visual exploration of modern black masculinity.