My Man Mitch is about the photographer’s home state of Indiana, manhood, and finding and maintaining queer space. After moving to New York to pursue a degree and career as a fine artist, Lewandowski, raised in a working-class, conservative, Christian environment, started to analyze these origins through photographic imagery native to Indiana and his family. Simultaneously he was photographing fellow gay men in their New York City apartments. Lewandowski combines his own photography with appropriated material, primarily Indiana high school yearbook photographs, as a dialogue on community and belonging, and a way to elaborate and expand upon his relationship to manhood and gay identity.

“I look at Indiana, my home state, in particular its laws regarding fireworks and guns. My parents’ high school yearbooks had ads in the back, recruiting for reliable steel production futures. I start forming an archive and contributing to it myself: The Photography Club in 1962, a triad of men with their firearms. It’s a fantasy world; A mass of rusted chain in 2015, in which one node betrayed the others. It looks like a migraine.”

-Ian Lewandowski