My Man Mitch concerns the photographer's home state of Indiana, masculinity, and the search for and preservation of queer space. Raised in a Christian, conservative, working-class environment, Ian Lewandowski moved to New York to study and pursue an artistic career, then began examining his origins through photographs of Indiana and his family. At the same time, he photographed other gay men in their New York apartments. Combining his own images with appropriated materials, mainly Indiana high-school yearbook photographs, he creates a dialogue about community and belonging while developing his relationship with masculinity and gay identity.
 
 
 
“I look at Indiana, my home state, particularly its laws on fireworks and guns. My parents' high-school yearbooks carried advertisements recruiting people for secure futures in steel production. I begin assembling an archive and contributing to it myself: the Photography Club in 1962, three men with their firearms. It is a fantasy world; a mass of rusty chain in 2015, in which one link betrayed the others. It looks like a migraine.”
 
 
 
— Ian Lewandowski