On the Podcast: Carlos Nazario and Tyler Mitchell on Using Texas to Celebrate America’s 250th Anniversary

Vogue Contributing Style Director Carlos Nazario and photographer Tyler Mitchell, who worked together on the summer issue’s “Lone Star State of Mind: Snapshots of Texans Today” shoot, first met when Mitchell was an intern at Art Partner. A mutual friend introduced them and showed Nazario some of Mitchell’s work. “I instantly was like, this kid’s amazing,” Nazario tells Chloe Malle on the latest episode of The Run-Through with Vogue.

Mitchell began taking photographs as a teenager in Atlanta, quickly becoming a serious student of the medium. “I started to realize that the images that we’re surrounded with in our daily lives are made by pretty much 12 people. I was like, there should be more voices here. That was really the call to action for me.” His perseverance paid off. In 2018, when he was just 23 years old, he was asked to shoot Beyoncé’s fourth Vogue cover—that year’s September issue.

The creative duo came into the podcast studio to discuss their stunning collaboration in the Summer 2026 issue—a sprawling portrait both of modern Texan life and, more broadly, of American diversity, 250 years into the nation’s history. Among their subjects were Dallas-born model Ruth Deng and her family; an Austin-based escaramuza team; a Houston-based cowboy crew; and The Ocean of Soul, Texas Southern University’s celebrated marching band. Though neither of them had spent significant time in the state prior to the shoot, both Nazario and Mitchell felt it was critical for them to be there. “We have to look at the South. To understand the dynamics of this country, one cannot avert their eyes from the South,” the latter says.

The story fit into a challenge presented by Vogue’s Summer issue: How could the creatives behind it recognize America’s semiquincentennial at a moment of such widespread turmoil and presidential hubris? “My first thought was it’s a complicated time in our history,” Mitchell noted, “and so without being naive to that reality, how do we address people’s real lives?” Their response, he jokes, to that difficult request, was to head straight to the borderlands; they decided to set part of this photo series in Big Bend National Park, which straddles the Texas–Mexico border.

In a very American turn of events, just as Vogue was settling on the national park as a location, news came out about the possibility of a border wall being erected in the area. Those plans have since been called off, but the discourse still loomed large over the shoot. “Your phone actually changes time zones down there,” Nazario explains. “But you also get down there, and you are in the river, and you’re thinking, borders are so arbitrary,” Mitchell adds.