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Mise-en-Scène

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Text and images by Gerardo Vizmanos.

Zygmunt Bauman argued that we live today in a time of utopia’s negation. According to him, contemporary society has replaced the pursuit of future ideal worlds with “retrotopias”, nostalgic projections of perfection onto a lost past. But I believe utopias are still possible today. Perhaps Bauman never encountered the photography as the one of Tyler Mitchell, whose work demonstrates that utopia remains a living, tangible possibility in the present.

Mitchell speaks of photography as a space to dream, but more than that, as a means of making dreams visible and real. His images, often depicting Black bodies in serene, joyful, or fantastical settings, are not escapist fantasies, they are affirmations of the possibility of beauty, softness, and dignity in the here and now. As Mitchell himself puts it, utopia is not confined to a distant or uncertain future; it can be accessed, created, and experienced in the present.

Of course, any conversation about utopia must eventually circle back to Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). In his imagined island, More offered a society governed by rules, rigid norms, and tight restrictions, elements that to us today may feel more dystopian than ideal. Yet despite this, the word “utopia” endures as shorthand for dream worlds and radical hope, far from the constraints of our perceived reality.

Utopias, then, are not fixed blueprints but evolving imaginaries. They emerge wherever people dare to imagine differently, whether in political theory, art, or a single photograph that dares to dream aloud.

Personally, I see utopia as a dream enacted in the present. The utopias I construct through photography are not awaiting some impossible island in the distant future to become real. As Tyler Mitchell suggests, photography offers a way to make dreams tangible, here and now.

For me, the most relevant question about utopia is not what it promises for the future, but rather where it originates and what compels us to seek it. I understand utopia less as a blueprint for a new world, and more as a form shaped by memory, a response to the need for freedom. This longing is often bound to the desire to transcend negative memories, whether rooted in lived experience or cultural imagination. In this sense, utopia is not born from futurism but from a past that aches for resolution. Art, and photography in particular, becomes a way to mediate this process, to give utopia a form in the present.

Utopia, therefore, doesn’t require a fixed place. In a study coordinated by Cicely Robinson on the painter Henry Scott Tuke, Michael Hatt suggests that Tuke’s paintings offer not just images, but worlds, for the bodies he paints, for his own desires, and for those of his viewers. These are not imaginary islands but carefully constructed “mise-en-scène” set in identifiable places, such as the shores of Cornwall.

This ties closely to Michel Foucault’s idea of heterotopia in his essay Of Other Spaces. Unlike utopias, which are abstract and non-existent, heterotopias are real spaces, “counter-places”, as he calls them, that mirror and contest our everyday environment. Tuke’s settings, then, are not arbitrary backdrops but heterotopic environments: real locations imbued with symbolic, affective, and erotic charge. They provide a space where desires can be staged and seen, without the need to escape into fiction.

In this way, both Mitchell and Henry Scott Tuke, through very different contexts, demonstrate that utopia is not a faraway promise, but a present possibility. It is an act of looking backward in order to move forward, and above all, of making space for desire, freedom, and beauty in the now.

Something similar happens in the photographs that George Platt Lynes and the Pajama group created in the 1940s, particularly in a series of images taken on Fire Island. Through their lens, the island itself is transformed into a heterotopia. Over the course of several summers, they staged photographs on New York beaches and in coastal homes, real, identifiable locations. And yet, the places they depict feel suspended between reality and fantasy. The landscapes exist, but the worlds they suggest perhaps do not. Like Tuke and Mitchell, Lynes and his circle constructed scenes suffused with longing, desire, and a sense of freedom, utopian not because they depicted an impossible future, but because they evoked a space more dreamed than real.

These images do not simply document but dramatize. They blur the line between memory and imagination, between the actual and the ideal. Through carefully staged compositions, they conjure a fragile but powerful elsewhere anchored in specific settings yet reaching beyond them. In this sense, Fire Island becomes more than a physical site; it becomes a symbolic counter-place, a heterotopia shaped by the interplay of bodies, light, desire, and artifice.

The photographs created by the Pajama group were probably not originally intended as works of art, but rather as a “mise-en-scène” of their own lives, a playful and intimate enactment of their complex personal relationships with love, desire, and emotional entanglements, including the tensions of need, envy, and jealousy that may have existed between them. These images were as much about staging themselves as they were about staging a world, an experiment in living and longing, captured in visual form.

Today, the social context of Fire Island has changed, as society itself has changed. The sense of liberation the Pajama group found on those beaches is not the same kind of freedom one might find there today. They lived in a more restrictive world, yet had the means—social, economic, and cultural, to imagine an alternative way of being. Their utopias were deeply intertwined with their personal and sexual relationships, as well as with a privileged social position that enabled them to construct visual narratives and aesthetics that were, at the time, accessible to very few.

The striking photographic work they produced on Fire Island may have been inspired by very different intentions than those of Tuke or Mitchell. And this is key: utopias are never abstract or universal, they are shaped by memory, context, and time. The way we read these images today is not the same as the way they were experienced when first created. To fully understand the utopias, and the beauty, love, joy, or tensions, that emerge in the works of Mitchell, Tuke, or the Pajama group, we must also try to understand the personalities, relationships, and social conditions that shaped the memories behind them.

Although today we often situate the Pajama group or George Platt Lynes within the broader framework of a “gay culture” that has since had a profound influence on many photographers, me included, their lives and work were in fact not so far removed from the society of classes of the first part of the XX century. They were part of a cosmopolitan, intellectual, and socially privileged elite. Their engagement with sexuality and art was not necessarily aimed at wider social liberation, but rather at redefining the moral codes of the circles in which they moved. Their efforts were directed toward making their own lives more livable, more beautiful, more sensually expressive, often by bending the norms of their class, not breaking away from them.

Their utopias, then, were not revolutionary in a political sense, but reformist within a specific social world they inhabited. This distinction is important: they helped build a visual culture that resonates today, but their aspirations were not oriented toward the democratization of desire or universal freedom. Instead, they sought to carve out spaces of freedom, intimacy, and pleasure within the limits of privilege. There were utopias designed for those who already had access to certain forms of power, education, and mobility.

Something similar can probably be said about my own photography. There is a memory and a context behind the images I create, one that may make sense only to me, or perhaps to a larger or smaller group of people with whom I share personal, social, or ideological connections. That memory and context shape the narratives I am able to construct in order to pursue the dream that every utopia embodies: the longing for some form of freedom.

Ultimately, the goal of any utopia is not to reach an ideal state, but to dismantle the constraints and injustices of the realities we inhabit. If we ever succeeded in creating a perfect world, we would likely find ourselves once again yearning for something else, another utopia to dream, another elsewhere to imagine. As Oscar Wilde wrote in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, “progress is the realization of utopias.”

I believe time operates in a particular way when it comes to utopias. The memory of a utopia can emerge from events that really happened (or from events that never did). And yet, the memory that never happened can feel just as real. In fact, it is not so different from the future we imagine but never reach, like the one described on Thomas More’s utopian island. Both are rooted in a truth that transcends factual accuracy: the emotional or conceptual necessity of a better world.

When Pedro Almodóvar was promoting his film Pain and Glory, a journalist asked him if the story had autobiographical elements. Almodóvar replied no, that what happens in the film did not happen to him, but “it could have happened to him.” That possibility without actuality, that could have happened, is, to me, a true foundation for utopia. Not because it tells us what is real, but because it reveals what we needed to feel real in order to survive, imagine, and move forward.

Utopias are the outcome of something real in the present. When we project utopias into an imaginary future, the present itself becomes a kind of “fictional real memory.” Fictional, because the future doesn’t yet exist—and therefore neither does its memory. But real, because if the future eventually arrives, its memory will be what today we call the present—something that already exists.

In a similar way, I find in my photography that when I reflect on a past that never happened, but could have, it is the present that truly matters. In utopia, the past and the future are not opposites, but twin sources of emotion and imagination. Just like in photography, we can speak of pasts and futures, but both only take form at a precise and urgent moment in the present.

Every utopia carries within it a kind of urgency—just as every act of creation does. There is a need to imagine, and then a need to act, because making it real becomes the only possible path. Perhaps Zygmunt Bauman lost faith in the possibility of utopia within our contemporary world. But I still believe it’s there, alive in dreams, in memory, and in every photograph that dares to make them real.

Gerardo Vizmanos

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