IAN LEWANDOWSKI
Name: Ian Lewandowski
Age: 33
Birthplace: Crown Point, Indiana, USA
Home: Brooklyn, New York, USA
Discipline: Photography
Studio Portrait no. 57, 2023, gelatin silver contact print, ed. of 4
What are the main topics you deal with in your practice?
I make portraits mostly. Portraiture feels like my medium, in that it is the subject matter through which I filter my ideas. The “theme” or concept seems to be the photographed human body in specific contexts. For the last four years (2019-2022), the portraits were outdoors, because I was curious how public space could influence my sitters’ negotiation with a camera. Now, I’m mostly working in my studio, making a body of work in one room in private. These new ones feel like they are pictures of the inside of my brain.
How do you define your artistic research?
My research is collecting and absorbing existing photographs. I have an insatiable appetite for pictures and can’t leave them alone. I think photographs were designed to be reproduced, and therefore are ultimately the product of those that preceded them. This medium’s reproducibility is its unique challenge and greatest strength. I make photographs so they can live in a continuum with others.
What images and spaces do you want to create through your work?
Right now in my studio, the space depicted seems to be a gay photo dungeon. It’s one room with a big table, lots of props, a wardrobe, light stands, tripods, a fog machine, cameras in various states of order and disrepair. The “set” gains and loses its contents as I come up with new poses, configurations and moods. The figures feel like proxy characters of myself that stand in for my questions, concerns, rage, ecstasy, indifference... the studio eats itself and evolves into something else each time.
Where and how do you find poetry?
Defunct and obsolete camera equipment is poetic to me. Photography equipment is a highly specialized set of expensive objects which are constantly superseded, deemed obsolete, discarded, and replaced. Photography as an industry is a similarly tenuous concept; it is heavily subject to shifting technologies and expensive to undertake, while not necessarily lucrative or professionally rewarding. I sense a deep connection between photography materials and the legacies of those who use them through time, their role, worth, and visibility, my own included.
In your view, what does being an artist mean in today’s world?
Being an artist, today and otherwise, means performing an irrational task ad nauseam, toward meaning.
Tim, Grover Cleveland Playground, 2021, from Night Music 2019-2023, gelatin silver contact print, ed. of 4