For Mr. Mitchell, the Beyoncé portraits, one of which was recently acquired by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, are suggestive of his broader concern to create photography that contains “a certain autobiographical element.” Mr. Mitchell, now 25, grew up in Atlanta and was fascinated by art and fashion images he saw on Tumblr. “Fashion was always something distant for me,” he says.

His own images evoke what he calls a “black utopia” — a telegraphing of black humanity long unseen in the public imagination. In “Untitled (Twins II)” from 2017, he features the brothers (and fashion models) Torey and Khorey McDonald of Brooklyn, seen draped in pearls and resting against a pink and cream backdrop. The photographs document the style, identity and beauty of black youth — “what I see to be a full range of expression possible for a black man in the future,” he explains. His subjects are often at play in grass, smiling in repose and occasionally peer with an honest gaze at the camera.

Mr. Mitchell is a part of a burgeoning new vanguard of young black photographers, including Daniel Obasi, Adrienne Raquel, Micaiah Carter, Nadine Ijewere, Renell Medrano and Dana Scruggs, who are working to widen the representation of black lives around the world — indeed, to expand the view of blackness in all its diversity. In the process, they are challenging a contemporary culture that still relies on insidious stereotypes in its depictions of black life.

These artists’ vibrant portraits and conceptual images fuse the genres of art and fashion photography in ways that break down their long established boundaries. They are widely consumed in traditional lifestyle magazines, ad campaigns, museums. But because of the history of exclusion of black works from mainstream fashion pages and the walls of galleries, these artists are also curating their own exhibitions, conceptualizing their own zines and internet sites, and using their social media platforms to engage directly with their growing audiences, who often comment on how their photographs powerfully mirror their own lives.