No. TWO

IAN LEWANDOWSKI

Brooks Let’s begin by talking about your new film, Light Your Name.

Lewandowski It started out with me taking photos for five years of former members of a club called The Saint, which was a private gay disco in New York. There were several gay discos at that time and it was kind of modeled after a couple other ones, but The Saint was for very serious partygoers. It catered to the clone contingent—they seemed to want to cultivate a dance floor of upwardly mobile white faggots. It was like a country club, kind of, and it was almost cultish in ways. The first invite to the club had some kind of copy on it that said something like dance is like a ritual, and it really reminded me of Suspiria because what they were doing was called something else, but it was actually like a pagan ritual. That's not what The Saint necessarily was, but that's what it was definitely giving.

Brooks What years was it in operation?

Lewandowski This was in New York, 1980 to 1988. It was like a more elaborate Studio 54. It had bigger capacity than Studio 54, but it was private. It wasn't really meant for everyone. There were no cameras allowed inside, so most of what's left of the club is printed matter. They produced a lot of that sort of thing: invites, posters, membership cards. They were really serious about their branding, but it's all within this network of members, only some of whom are still alive today. Something like forty percent of the club's membership died of AIDS. When talking about The Saint, that statistic tends to be like the second sentence: forty percent to half of the members died of AIDS. These men were just that exact like demographic of people who were decimated by AIDS: party-going, sex-having white gay guys in New York. Obviously AIDS affected so many other kinds of people, but it definitely affected this demographic. It was like a perfect storm. 

Brooks How did you learn about it?

Lewandowski I learned about it because my friend Miguel was living with this man, Gil, during COVID. They were doing that thing that people did during COVID where they just thought why don’t we just live together? So that we can be a pod or whatever. So they did that. At the time, Miguel was probably in his late twenties, and Gil is about to turn seventy. Gil was a member of The Saint when it was open in the 80s. He has a little studio apartment in the West Village, and when I went to visit them both, it was covered in The Saint ephemera. Posters, matchbooks, fliers, articles, all sorts of things. It was a huge part of his life. I was interested in it, and then I had another friend, independently of that and in the same week, who brought up The Saint to me.

Brooks Oh, wow.

Lewandowski Do you know the Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger?

Brooks Yes, I do.

Lewandowski My friend Bruce is basically the holder for his photo estate, and so I was going to look at some prints at his house. Bruce’s husband Tim was there and he asked me if I had ever heard of The Saint. He was a member, and I was like, this is so funny because just yesterday I was talking about The Saint with another friend who was a member. It was a coincidence, and then I met another person related to The Saint, and so on and so forth. I started making it a point to learn about the place and to meet people who were associated with it. Around that time I was asked by Jarrett Earnest, brilliant art critic and editor, to contribute some photos to this Canadian art journal PUBLIC, and the photo he wanted to include was of Gil, my friend who was a member of The Saint. The journal probably only needed that one photo, but Jarrett proposed building out the story a little more. I think he suggested, you know, taking like three or four more photos, but I ended up working on it for another year after that, and then it was fully a project unexpectedly. It began in the name of just finishing something for the journal, but I just was so interested in it and kept meeting new Saint people, seeing the stuff and stories they had. Everybody seemed to keep like every postcard they ever got from The Saint, every invite or whatever.  I would just listen to their stories and started making a lot of photos that are sort of some dramatized version of the stories they told me.

Brooks Oh, cool.

Lewandowski The place was so important for them, and it was such a formative experience they had when they were young. A lot of drugs were being done, a lot of sex was happening,  and The Saint was the background for all these things happening in their lives and now most of it lives only in their memories. It’s not documented.  The reason we have so many photos of Studio 54 is because they encouraged photography. The point of that place was to be seen. The Saint was definitely more about the spiritual experience of dance; of course, it was also about drugs and about fucking and all of that, but it was really meant as a sacred space for people who were really serious about disco, really serious about dancing.

Brooks There were gay aspects to Studio 54, but—and this seems like an odd thing to say—it was also more mainstream, wasn’t it, whereas The Saint, which was explicitly a gay club, naturally had to be more secretive at the time.

Lewandowski Yes. In the 1970s in New York, the only way really to have a gay establishment, or to have a gay bar, was to keep the cops away, and if you needed protection from cops, you asked the mafia. At that time, you could still raid a gay bar legally, or at least no one questioned the cops if they did that.

Brooks We forget that it was like that.

Lewandowski Yes. Bruce Mailman, who started The Saint, wanted to make something that was nicer than what straight people had. He was the owner of the Saint Marks Baths. I’ve always wondered whether The Saint was sort of liquidated money that he didn't want to report to the government, or something similar. That probably answers the question of why The Saint was such an elaborate undertaking. To make The Saint today, with inflation, it would cost something like seventeen million dollars.

Brooks Whoa! For a club.

Lewandowski For a club! It was very elaborate. One of the main things we explore in the film is that the club was designed to look at feel like a planetarium.

Brooks Oh, really?

Lewandowski Yes. It was basically a big round dance floor with a dome over it and then planetarium projector, which also added lighting effects, in the middle. But it was functional as a planetarium in the same way that like the Hayden Planetarium is. Bruce's whole idea was that he wanted it to feel like as if you were dancing like under the stars. A lot of the clubs and DJs and talent for The Saint was pulled from Fire Island, because Fire Island is where disco was the most fervent at that time. A lot of the DJs at The Saint were also DJing at The Pavilion, for instance, on Fire Island. Bruce, the owner, wanted to have that experience in the city.

Brooks Cool.

Lewandowski He had come from theater production, so it actually makes perfect sense. It was super theatrical.

Brooks And it closed in 1988.

Lewandowski Yes. AIDS was kind of fully an issue by 1982, 1983. From 1984 to 1988, The Saint was much less attended. A lot of people had died, and those who remained had lost a lot of their friends, so they were not exactly in a partying mood. You basically had to pay dues to be a member of The Saint—like you also paid per party, per night, although less than a guest would pay—and it was very expensive. Because they had lost so many members, by the end of the run they had slashed prices, even opened it up to straight people, opened it up to the public. By 1988, Bruce just couldn’t afford to keep it open, couldn’t afford the overhead, so he announced its closure. The Saint had regular dancing nights, but they also had special parties—the Black Party, the White Party, the Christmas Party—and when he closed the club, Bruce then proposed the idea of having the same type of parties but at different places, in satellite locations, like Roseland Ballroom. He basically proposed what came to be the circuit party, and this is so interesting, because really the circuit party only exists because of AIDS.

Brooks How interesting.

Lewandowski Right? Because he proposed something where The Saint can exist in different places, and something called The Saint at Large was then born, which was that series of parties, in the same way that Rex and Horse Meat Disco are parties. The Black Party is the only thing they still do, but it still happens every year; so The Saint lives on in that way. Bruce died of AIDS in 1994, so someone else runs The Saint at Large now.

Brooks But the club itself closed in 1988.

Lewandowski Yes, the club closed in 1988 and then the dome and everything was demolished in 1996, and it was a bank for a long time after that. And before it was The Saint, it was The Fillmore East, where the Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin performed.

Brooks Wow. What a storied location.

Lewandowski It always had this kind of dance or rock history, but now it's nothing. Now there's a condo in one part of the building and the front is empty. But there is so much history, and my film is about that history, and a lot about the planetarium. Ultimately it’s a movie about love, about devotion and honoring the dead, honoring the past.

Brooks That’s beautiful. Have you always thought you would make a film?

Lewandowski No, I didn't. Everything else I do is two dimensional and completely still. There have been moments in the last several years where I have thought what if this was moving? Like what if? The narrative part of making a film was always secondary. I just thought something has to move. And when I saw the projector from The Saint, which was sold at auction, then went through a couple different hands and is now in Arizona, I had to see it. So I just went to Arizona to see it, to shoot it. It moves, the projector, and it has this hypnotizing effect because it moves on three axes. It's meant to illustrate star patterns in the sky. Watching that is what kind of sealed it for me: I was like yeah, I need to make a film. This has to be moving. The projector is really the center of the film, I guess.

Brooks Fascinating.

Lewandowski The funny thing is when I went to go see it, I was still thinking I need to go to Arizona and photograph this projector. But I ended up taking a short video, making it for a show I did in Texas.

Brooks At the Green Family Art Foundation?

Lewandowski Yes. It’s an eight minute film called Phoenix Rising. It’s sort of just about the projector and its origin, but it’s only eight minutes long, and was made for very little money. It really is more like a sample. I knew when I was making it that I wasn’t telling the whole story, that I had to keep going.  Light Your Name is about the projector and its origins, how most of its life was in this club, where all these people were dancing—and some of those people are in the film—but there is also this other huge, historical thing, which is The Saint.

Brooks It sounds incredible.

Lewandowski Thank you.

Brooks What is your personal relationship to dancing, to that kind of Fire Island revelry?

Lewandowski I've experienced Fire Island just by having lived in New York long enough that I have made enough of a circle of friends to go. I couldn't go to Fire Island without someone hooking me up with staying on their couch. That's how I started going. I think that's how a lot of people start going, because it's really prohibitively expensive, and especially for young people. I think I was twenty-five when I first went out there. In New York, there are politics around the subject of Fire Island; it is very much about class it's about race, and other things.  Fire Island has all of these associations with it being a paradise, it's also very exclusive. It’s very expensive to get there. You can't really traverse around it if you are not an able-bodied person. There are a lot of issues associated with it, but at the same time, it's very magical. For me, being able to participate in life there feels like a privilege. I think it’s important to reckon with its history if you’re going to be out there partying or making art or both. And—this is something I'm trying to tap into with the film—it feels like there are ghosts on fire everywhere. When you're there, you feel as if you're inside this living history, if you care to learn about or feel that history.

Brooks A person could go there and not notice all of that.

Lewandowski Oh yes, of course. Our community sort of refers to it as just Fire Island, but most of the island is straight. We’re really talking about a very specific part of the island actually: Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines. It’s a little enclave in the way that Provincetown or Saugatuck, Michigan is. For me, being able to participate in life there feels good and I feel like I reckon with the history of the place.

Brooks And dancing?

Lewandowski I used to do more dancing. I don't drink, and I don't really do harder drugs, so it's not something that has ever occurred to me to do often. I've done it enough that I've experienced it, and have had amazing revelatory experiences of dancing. Since I started the film, I've probably gone out more, just to get the feel of certain type of music. There have been times where I totally get dancing being someone's entire life, or at least their entire life as far as leisure. The funny thing is that you're among thousands of people at these places, but you're alone in your head. It's not really about dancing with your friends. It’s a communal experience, but also a really individual experience. The part of it that makes me less excited is that in New York, the gays are so obsessed with who's going to what event. I'm sort of like, oh, they're all in Bushwick. I can't go to any of them. [laughs]

Brooks Bushwick feels wrong? Or it’s just too far from you?

Lewandowski It's very far, but I also just don’t like it. [laughs] I'll go a long distance if I feel like going there, but I just don’t like Bushwick. It repels me. That means that I miss out on a lot of stuff, but more and more I just feel like that's not where I'm supposed to be right now.

Brooks It’s good to have that clarity of feeling.

Lewandowski Recently, I went to a really cool party. The Saint produced some legendary DJs, and some of them are still working. In the late 1970s, DJs could be as powerful as the radio, because the radio stations would look to certain DJs to see what to play on the radio. That was how music was sort of distributed at that time. And the mainstream DJs were stealing shit from the gay DJs—because gay DJs have the best music taste, obviously—and The Saint DJs were legendary. My friend Christina Visca was a woman member of The Saint, which was pretty rare. Later in life, she threw these Saint-esque parties with her friends as DJs. I went to one of her parties, and I had the experience, as close as it could be now, to what it was like at The Saint. It was a much different setting, like in Greenpoint, but being there, I was like, oh, I get it. I was looking around me and was watching people in their late sixties, early seventies looking like they were twenty and thirty years old. They had been dancing together for that long. I cried because it was so beautiful. Some of the people were in my film; I had met them already and knew them, but others I just met that night.

Brooks How beautiful.

Lewandowski It really was. My relationship to dance has changed, I guess, since I've made the film, because I'm more interested in going out dancing now.

Brooks That's a nice unexpected result.

Lewandowski Yeah, it's hard. I was dating my ex boyfriend Alex for two years (with whom I still go out and whom I love deeply) and he loved going out to Wrecked and to these more cruisey dance parties, but I just wanted to hear what it sounded like at The Saint. That’s probably not possible, but I wanted to get close, like high energy disco, but there are only a few parties like that. The music played at these parties that Alex would go to would be more like house or trance or techno.

Brooks Maybe you have to start your own party.

Lewandowski I don't want to DJ, though. I don't think I'm good at that. I'd hire someone else to do that. I have a real reverence now for DJing. To pick music and kind of control a crowd through music, it’s such an art.

Brooks Yes, it is. Last December in Miami during Art Basel I was at Twist and—unfortunately I don’t remember the songs—but there was a transition from one song to the next that was beyond sublime. They were both great songs—one was really obscure, I think, but I knew it—but in a million years no one would have played these songs in succession. The DJ at Twist did and it was perfect.

Lewandowski Right.

Brooks To be able to produce a feeling like that is such a gift. It’s magic.

Lewandowski Absolutely. I sometimes think about the DJs at The Saint, and the members. Membership was expensive, and you had to go out a lot to make it worth it. In some ways, these peoples’ whole lives revolved around The Saint. A lot of the members were professionals: doctors, lawyers, this sort of thing. A higher class of gays, so to speak. But in the end, it didn’t matter. HIV and AIDS didn’t discriminate.

Brooks How diverse was the crowd at The Saint, in terms of race and ethnicity?

Lewandowski There was nothing in any of the literature of The Saint that said anything about race, but it was sort of like you had to audition to be had to be a member.  It wasn’t only about money. This is in the beginning; later on they were admitting a lot of people. Some of the people who were deciding surely had biases, and they either purposely or inadvertently wanted to have a very white membership. Some of the members I talked to even said if you went to The Saint, you were probably into white guys. If you went to this other club, you were probably into black and Latino guys. A lot of clubs were delineated by race at that time, just in general. There wasn’t as much concern for diversity then, even in the gay community. Even gay people had their biases.

Brooks Yes they did, and yes they do.

Lewandowski With my film, I'm interested in how they were building up The Saint and its membership to be this higher class of gay people, but those people were still subject to HIV and AIDS, regardless of how much money they had. Across a lot of my other work, I’ve thought about what happens when you try to build a perfect Queer space, like do the same things that plague straight people befall people like us? We’re bound to try to make safer and better places for ourselves, but we are human and live in the world, and we're gonna always have our own flaws or our own biases. That is ultimately, I think, just a lesson to carry away with: if you try to build paradise, you will fail. No matter what. As I've made work over many years, I've found that that’s the biggest thing I'm interested in.

Brooks Yes.

Lewandowski Anything you build can get big enough to where you're then excluding. There are voices in the film that say I wouldn't have been admitted into The Saint because I was this or that. It was like very cloy kind of place. All of these issues associated with The Saint, I don't like them necessarily, but I think it makes for a more compelling story to have all these issues that are always the same for all kinds of people. 

Brooks That makes sense. And they’re real. Those kinds of problems and issues are, in one way or another, present in every endeavor, every community, because they’re very human problems.

Lewandowski Exactly.

Brooks Division, exclusion, class.

Lewandowski Right. I don't know what my thesis statement necessarily is for the film, but it's a very human story and I'm interested in talking about that. There is a slippery slope when looking at things like this where people play the blame game. The Saint had always been so full of itself, and when AIDS happened, there was animosity towards The Saint. A lot of gay people blamed The Saint for the spread of the disease. There was definitely sex happening inside, but that was the case for a lot of places. The Saint was really a place that people loved to hate. There are many documented examples of people referring to AIDS as Saint’s disease.

Brooks Oh, wow.

Lewandowski It is true that the people that were at The Saint were probably also members of other clubs, where there was more sex happening, and they were probably also traveling and going other places and having sex. There is certainly truth in that, and at that time, we didn't have anywhere to place blame because the fucking government decided to pit people against each other and not take responsibility for a public health emergency. What I'm trying to do with the film is talk about the fact we're bound to try to make something perfect and bound to fail. This group of people had this beautiful, legendary, completely unique, once in a lifetime place for themselves to dance. And then AIDS happens and all of a sudden they’re a hazard to those around them. And ignorance and misinformation about it only deepens this schism. In the film, we tell the story of a man who vacationed on Fire Island every year with his friends; he bought a house, he was a very successful gay doctor.  He was diagnosed with AIDS and ultimately died. His family had already disowned him for being gay, but when he died, the family tyrannically and successfully tried to take the house away from his friends. At that time, to be gay was worse than anything. That feeling is in the film, too.

Brooks When is the film going to be completed?

Lewandowski At this point we are in editing mode. There's one part I’m shooting August 19th. The very ending of the film. Otherwise, we are done shooting. We’re editing Act One now.

Brooks I can’t wait to watch it.

Lewandowski I hope to have a rough cut by November. We're trying to apply to a couple of film festivals, and they're due then.

Brooks You’ve been doing some fundraising?

Lewandowski Yes, I raised about $18,000 which was great. My goal was very aggressive at $40,000, but I thought $18,000 was actually pretty good. I feel so appreciative. Visual Aids sponsored my fundraiser, which ensured that the donations were tax deductible. They recently had their own fundraiser and I went to the ceremony, which was like a gala celebrating three filmmakers. The subject of a lot of the speeches were about the power of grassroots fundraising to make a film. Something like ninety people donated to my fundraiser. At first, I felt strange. I don't exactly want to ask my friends for money; they are also working on their own things and have their own projects. I don't think they're responsible for giving to my thing.

Brooks But people want to help if they can.

Lewandowski Yes. I know everyone disagrees with me on that, and everyone says oh, we wanna help you. That’s great, but I guess I strive for a world where someone who can really afford it just believes in the idea enough that they would pay for it. Isn’t that how any art stuff works?

Brooks A lot of the time, yes.

Lewandowski When I've posted about fundraising, it's never to assume that friends are gonna pay for it. But I’d love for them to share it with those who can really afford it. I want to have enough money to actually hire the person that I want to do X or Y part of the film, the editing, the sound, etc. I want the film to be the product of those people’s efforts. I can only really do that if I can afford to pay those people what they deserve.

Brooks Labor deserves recognition, but it also requires payment, so people can keep doing what they do.

Lewandowski Exactly.

Brooks We're all happy to do things for free, or for our friends when we can, but for most of us, if we aren’t paid for our work, we can’t continue to make it.

Lewandowski Exactly. As an artist, I've always had this feeling of asking people…do you guys think I just do this for fun? I mean I do, kind of, but I also think that an artist should be paid for what they do. It’s just so difficult.

Brooks This is your career. Yes, it’s your passion, but it's your livelihood, and not just because you love it.

Lewandowski Yeah. Did you watch The Last Showgirl?

Brooks No, I didn’t. This is the film with Pamela Anderson?

Lewandowski Yes, it's a Gia Coppola film. It was very good; it’s about this idea of an artist who hones their craft and their art, but they're not perfect, and they had to make a lot of sacrifices to be that good at what they do. Ultimately all of that is superseded by something else. It's a really good movie about like being an artist.

Brooks I'll check it out.

Lewandowski Yes, do it.

Brooks I will. First, I want to talk with you about Tori Amos.

Lewandowski Oh, okay!

Brooks Although she's not as much a part of my life as she was when I was younger, I am a huge fan. When I was in high school and college, she was such a presence and dominant force in my life. I was in high school when Under the Pink and Boys For Pele came out, and then the several albums after that were so important to me. I know that you love her, but you’re a bit younger than me. How did you discover her? Was it in Indiana when you were a kid?

Lewandowski My mom was a fan of Tori Amos.

Brooks Okay, my parents were listening to Neil Diamond. [laughs]

Lewandowski Oh, ok. [laughs]

Brooks Neil, who is great and whom I also love.

Lewandowski Yeah. My mom was like a casual listener, but I feel like I was really cognizant of Tori when Scarlet’s Walk came out in 2002. I was twelve, and I have a lot of music memories from the radio station my parents would play in the garage, which was WXRT out of Chicago.

Brooks Yeah, I know that station.

Lewandowski It’s alternative. That station loved Tori and I remember them playing A Sorta Fairytale.

Brooks Which is a fantastic song.

Lewandowski It is. The whole album is. Then and now Scarlet’s Walk competes with Boys For Pele as my favorite Tori album.

Brooks It’s so hard for me to choose. I would probably say Under the Pink is my favorite. But Scarlet’s Walk is excellent, and I’m sorry to say it is really the last album of hers that I really got into. I need to revisit them all.

Lewandowski It's a really good album and it's so different from anything before it. She does that she does that every time, though. Are you a PJ Harvey fan?

Brooks Yes.

Lewandowski She is another one who does that.

Brooks Yes.

Lewandowski I tell my friends to listen to Tori, but I tell them you have to give it time, because she doesn’t always fit right away, and I think a lot of people misunderstand what she’s doing anyway. I had been listening to her when I was younger, but it took me a while. I actually bought Under the Pink on CD and listened on repeat—for so long—to Baker Baker. That song really stuck with me, and lyrically, I think it made me get what she was doing. I think that album is so interesting because it has extreme highs and extreme lows. People sometimes conceive of Under the Pink as conservative, and if you think about it now, in comparison to later work, it is, but at the time it was quite radical that she was putting electric guitar with piano in the way she was.

Brooks Oh, yes. It felt absolutely radical when it came out. There wasn’t anything else that sounded like that. You mentioned Baker Baker; that song is very quiet, but then there is Pretty Good Year, which has such soft, tender piano and then these really jarring, shocking guitars.

Lewandowski Yes.

Brooks I remember driving my sister and her friends around, I guess I would have still been in high school, or maybe I was a freshman in college and I was playing Space Dog and there is that lyric Deck the halls it’s you again, it’s you again / Somewhere someone must know the ending / Is she still pissing in the river now? / Heard she’d gone, moved into a trailer park and one of my sister’s friends was like oh, I thought this was a classy song? [laughs]

Lewandowski [laughs] My theory about Pretty Good Year has always been that she put that as the first song on that album because it's like this beautiful testament. That song is like a piano recital song. It's a testament to good piano playing, and then she has this little bridge where it turns into…well, the funny thing about that part is that it's not electric guitar, it's kind of trompe-l'œil electric guitars, but it’s actually just bass…it’s someone just like scratching the strings of the base. My theory is that part of that song, symbolically, is Why Kant Tori Read?

Brooks Which was the name of her first band and represents, symbolically, her time at the music conservatory and getting kicked out.

Lewandowski Yes, it's like her path.

Brooks That's a great description, a great theory. I hadn't listened to Under the Pink for a while and was recently talking to a younger friend about Tori and put some songs on a playlist and was struck by how good it is, how much it still means to me. Those last three songs are so expansive. They’re just kind of wild. She goes through so much on that record.

Lewandowski Yeah. I think the whole charm of that record is how varied it is. Should we talk about the B-sides? That’s really the best part of Tori.

Brooks Yes. It’s a great part of her output.

Lewandowski And the artwork for the singles is so good.

Brooks Yes. I have many of them, wherever they are. Wherever my CDs are. I think in my parents’ garage.

Lewandowski I think the most valuable one I have, monetarily speaking, is Past the Mission UK single. That song was not a single in the US, but it was in the UK. I love all that shit with Tori so much partly because it's something that doesn't exist anymore. The singles were a way to release the songs that didn’t fit on the album.

Brooks Right, and all of that doesn't exist anymore because of the nature of how music is listened to and acquired.

Lewandowski I think it's the same problem in the art world where, if you're on a label, the goal of the label is to make your music or your work rare. But if we look at Tori's catalog, it's so not rare. She has so many songs, and sure, she was on a label at that time, but her B-sides don’t feel like they’re muddying the waters or anything because her catalog is this big, beautiful thing. Bjork did the same thing. There are so many B-sides and remixes and stuff of Bjork’s that are amazing.

Brooks Artists like Tori and Bjork obviously had a lot of artistic control since they were able to do that. I loved how may B-sides there seemed to be, but how they were not available indefinitely. The first time I went to Europe, which was when I was twenty-two in 2001, one of the things I was most excited about was being able to go into music stores and buy weird versions of albums or weird singles that I couldn't get in the US. This was also pre-internet, or at least before the internet as we know and use it now.

Lewandowski Did you see that I recently posted on Instagram the German single for [Tori Amos’] God? The cover is so crazy.

Brooks I will look it up.

Lewandowski She's wearing this crazy like red thing on her head and it’s like a telephone. That single is probably the rarest one.

Brooks Oh yeah. Wow.

Lewandowski Spark, which was a more popular song, a very big song, is another great single. There are several versions of that single from different regions.

Brooks Are you still buying physical CDs?

Lewandowski I don't do it actively. I just wait for them to come to me. Like when I was traveling this past week, I found the Crucify single on tape.

BrooksOh, I have so many tapes somewhere, too. Probably also in my parents’ garage. And tapes are back, I think?

Lewandowski Yeah, and why? The sound quality is not really good, and that’s coming from me, someone who loves shitty things.

Brooks [laughs] Oh, yeah, Spark has Bachelorette on it.

Lewandowski Oh yeah, that's one of my favorites. I think the Spark US edition has her cover of Steely Dan.

Brooks Oh, really? What song is it?

Lewandowski Do It Again.

Brooks Oh wow, I don't think I've heard that. At least not in a long time.

Lewandowski Actually, I think it's probably on Spark UK.

Brooks I miss all of this.

Lewandowski Yeah, me too.

Brooks This is not exactly the same, but during the pandemic did you hear the cover Miley Cyrus recorded of [Mazzy Star’s] Fade Into You?  

Lewandowski Oh, I heard that, yeah.

Brooks I loved it.

Lewandowski I should go back and listen to it.

Brooks I suppose I am a fan of hers. I believe her when she sings, and that's so important to me. I really liked her version of that song, and I wish they had released it. If record companies were still doing B-sides, it would have been perfect.

Lewandowski Maybe if casette tapes fully come back, then B-sides and singles will, too.

Brooks I don't think tapes will ever fully come back. Where do you play your tapes?

Lewandowski I have a record player with a tape deck. And then I have a tape player in my room that I use. I have some audio books on tape that I listen to in my bedroom.

Brooks Do you have a CD player in your car?

Lewandowski Yes, I do, and I have a lot of CDs in my car.

Brooks I've been to your studio several times and I've heard you playing Tori Amos there.

Lewandowski Oh, yeah.

Brooks What else do you listen to when you work?

Lewandowski Recently it's been like older Charlie XCX. And then these days I've been listening to a lot of DJs from The Saint. It'll be like the New Year's set for 1983 or something.

Brooks Where do you find that?

Lewandowski A lot of the DJs were recording their stuff by just plugging a tape recorder into the amp so that they could go back and refine it. People have put the recordings on SoundCloud.

Brooks Wonderful.

Lewandowski Yeah, it is. I've been listening to a few of those on repeat. It's a way to learn what’s what and who’s who. Some DJs are more black party, some are more white party, more up, more down, more dramatic, more theatrical.

Brooks Since Anthony’s [Ian’s husband, painter Anthony Cudahy] studio is next to yours, is he also listening to this music? Are you the DJ for the studios?

Lewandowski The wall between our studios is paper thin, so I am, but sometimes he'll play music instead.

Brooks Besides the film, what else are you working on in the studio?

Lewandowski I’ve been filming, but I’ve also been taking still photos. The stills are sort of in that same realm of the working I’ve been making for years. Each scene of the film really has like a still photo associated with it. One day there will be a more flushed out version of the exhibition I had in Texas with the Greens. The film, for me, is really a moving version of the photo essay.

Brooks What a cool way to think about it.

Lewandowski That's how I wanted to function. Other photos I've been taking recently…I’ve had to put the studio stuff on pause, and it's weird because I don't normally pause on any project because it makes me think like, well, am I just not gonna come back to it?

Brooks You know you will. You know, I know that. But I know that feeling of like, oh if I stop this, will it stop?

Lewandowski Even if it did stop, who cares? I want to finish that studio work, but if I paused it for a while, that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

Brooks And even if you finished what you had planned to finish, it’s still something that maybe in five years you might come back to, realizing that you’re not finished, that it needs another part.

Lewandowski Exactly. There have been other things of mine that have evolved that way, where some piece of it comes from before.

Brooks But right now, you’re essentially on hold in the studio.

Lewandowski Yeah, because I realize that when I'm there, I have to focus on being there. The film is taking up a lot of time, and if I try to do both, they will both suffer.

Brooks You're exactly right. I know that with my own work—and I have many different projects—sometimes you just have to finish something, rather than splitting your time all the time. Otherwise nothing ever gets finished.

Lewandowski I just go crazy because when I'm in the studio, I need to be able to be there for long hours. When I was younger, I thought, get in the time wherever you can. But I'm a lot slower now. I'm older now, I move slower now. I need more sleep now. There are all these things that I actually really welcome as changes to the work, but it is hard because the work was already slow and now it's even slower. I think that's great, but in the short term it sucks because I feel like that's a failure or something.

Brooks But it isn’t. It’s just different.

Lewandowski Yes. And—I've talked to Anthony a lot about this—in making this film, which is something I’ve never done before, I relish the opportunity to be a rookie for the first time in a while. Once I figured out, when I was younger, that I wanted be a photographer, that desire never went away. That was the light, that was the fire under my ass for so long. I thought I have to be so good at this. I have to be taken so seriously. It actually is a lot like Tori Amos talks about when she was composing when she was younger and just had to be taken really seriously. I wanted to be taken really seriously doing being a photographer, and that wore me out, it made me very self-critical for that reason. Being new  to making a film, I actually love it because I don't have any ego, I don’t have any baggage.

Brooks That is so interesting. In my conversation with Diedrick Brackens, which was published in our first issue, we talked about this very feeling. As a visual artist, he works in fiber and with weavings, but he also writes poetry. He said the same thing: when he is writing, he doesn’t have the same ego he has when making his visual work because part of him thinks I don’t really know about this, I’m just exploring it. I'm paraphrasing, but there is something healthy about this attitude, and about opening up yourself to learn, and explore, and do something new.

Lewandowski It is kind of a stereotype for photographers to end up making films, but now I get it because the thing with being a photographer is that everything is about time. Everything boils down to the fact that it's a time-based medium and the fact that there is that split-second moment that you take the photograph, and then the moment is gone, that moment is dead. And with shooting a film, I had to start thinking about making something moving was that was alive for that whole fifty minutes rather than just the brief time that the person sits for the photograph. The living in that part is interesting. I have a friend who is a painter and she uses oil pastel and she was talking about that when you use oil pastel or like a medium like that, you're moving around a dead medium, like you’re massaging rigor mortis of the medium. And I feel like that's what I'm doing making a photograph. It’s this old process, this old substrate that is not fresh. It's not living or alive. It's dead the moment I take the picture. With a film, even though I am using a manual camera, it's a whole different set of concerns. My film can include audio from something else; it can include video that's unrelated to the audio. All these different contradictions can come in. Still photography doesn’t quite work that same way for me.

Brooks But is that really how you think about your photographic work, as being dead? Or is it just that just the word you're using in lieu of another word, like static, for example?

Lewandowski Well, what I mean is that when you take a picture, the sensitive surface that you shoot it on, like the film, or the sensor of the camera, that moment dies. I'm talking more figuratively. The challenge is always to make something that is alive right out of it. No, I don't think of my work as dead dead. I think the other reason I use that word is because I use these old materials and old technology. I like the challenge of using something that's so sedentary.

Brooks Describe for us a little about the cameras that you use in the studio.

Lewandowski Sure. In and out of my studio, I use several view cameras. View cameras are essentially just a dark box with a film on one side and a lens on the other and a shutter. That film in the back is the sensitive surface that I was saying “dies” when you take the picture. But when you use a camera like that, you're taking into account the personality of the camera. They can be very stubborn and very they have such a presence in the room because it's so big. You have to contend with it as the photo-making apparatus. I think photo technology has always evolved toward How do we make this process easier? How do we make this more automated? How do we make it easier to get a better picture every time? I'm not interested in those things; those aren't the properties that I appreciate about photography. I don't need it to be easy. I don't need it to be clear. There are times where I'm looking for that in the picture, but I don't think the act of taking the picture is just about clarity and ease.

Brooks If there's clarity, you want it to be something that you have found rather than something provided to you.

Lewandowski Yeah. I want to exploit the medium for all of those desires that I have rather than have it just slammed in my lap easily.

Brooks Right.

Lewandowski But, regardless of what I want, as a photographer who lives and works in the world in 2025, I have to contend with the fact that photography has evolved and moved through history in a way that has made it easier every time, over time. At this point, we don't need a human to make a photograph.

Brooks Yeah.

Lewandowski I'm more interested in the actual light being cast on the surface and leaving an impression. That part is the most magical part to me. It's not that I don't think that photos should be easy for people to take; I do, especially since the whole history of the medium is that it was a rich person's hobby in the past. Once photography was incepted, it was a very expensive kind of proclivity or a hobby, and it was even kind of eccentric. So I don't think that photography should exist in this ivory tower; I don't think that photos shouldn't be easy to take. I just don't need them to be easy to take for myself.

Brooks Right.

Lewandowski A lot of photographers will say I hate that everyone has a camera now and everyone has an iPhone. I think that it’s actually great. It’s just the evolution of the medium, and it means that we're dealing with a medium that is so complicated that it's both a fine art medium and something more mainstream. It's something that we have to reckon with. We have to recognize that it also has this longer history, that it had to be adapted, massaged into being something that was that easy. And at this point, there's no one alive that can remember a time before photography. I have a lot of feelings about photography’s lack of presence in the art world. There are so many highly educated arts professionals I know who claim that they know nothing about photography and I think that's bullshit. I think we all know something about photography. I think it's actually really conservative, frankly, for other artists also to be like I don't know anything about photography. Yes you do. It's making an image. You know how that works.

Brooks That’s true. And we’re confronted with them thousands of times a day.

Lewandowski Yeah. I know that not everyone's interested in making a photograph, and that's fine. But you can’t just be like oh, I don't know anything about that, so I'm just not gonna engage. What if I said that about paintings? What if I said that about sculpture?

Brooks Of course.

Lewandowski And I get it; part of it is that photography wasn't a thing before the 1840s, 1860s. Painting has been around for millennia. I understand that. But I think there is this attitude in the art world that photography is this other thing, and actually it's been in museums, galleries, and institutions since the 1940s. I think there is a lot of weird, willful ignorance around photography in the art world.

Brooks Do you think that comes out of a dismissiveness?

Lewandowski I think that it's ultimately because it doesn't sell the same way that other work does, or that the way that it thrives in an art context is more academic. I don’t know, there is this chicken or egg thing: is it lack of engagement or lack of exposure? Most art people can point to Cindy Sherman, they can point to only a few photographers. I think that photography is sort of treated as if it was a movement, a path, as if it was Cubism or something. When it's shown in galleries and museums, it's in a section of the museum that does only photography. I think it is siloed in these unproductive ways that ultimately aren't serving it as a medium and aren't letting it grow and thrive.

Brooks I wonder if it has become harder to sell as the photograph has become more and more part of our daily lives.

Lewandowski I think we need to think of a different kind of value system for photographs that isn't about money, because the fact is photographs are not rare in the way that paintings are rare. But that doesn't make them less important, historically. They are important in a different way, but I think the art market doesn't have room for that kind of nuance. Or rather it should, but I don’t think people seem willing to make room for it, especially now, when artists and galleries are in survival mode. They don’t know if they can keep the lights on, so they’re clearly not going to take a risk and experiment by adding photographers to their rosters.

Brooks Maybe they will come around.

Lewandowski I don’t know. I think to be—and I hate this phrase, but I guess I am one—to be a fine art photographer is to be misunderstood on both sides. When you go to school for photography, a lot of what you're learning about is being on set and being on in the studio, working with a client, delivering a product to that client, working with the director, things like that. A lot of photographers are really great at those things. I am not great at them. I'm not that great at working with a director; visions that I have for the photos and the vision of the director rarely align, though I have done it. It's sort of like I'm too arty. That sounds so lame, but it's actually true, and I have years of proof of this fact. So I’m too arty for someone to hire me as a photographer, but then I'm too photo for the gallery or museum world. Some of the more commercial opportunities are difficult for me because they don't wanna necessarily work with someone using an old camera because old things can break and those editors have deadlines and bosses of their own.

Brooks But you continue to work with the materials that you want to use because that's what you want to do.

Lewandowski Yes. It’s really only adventurous people who are also kind of arty that hire me, and I like that.

Brooks You have to be true to your vision. You can’t try to look at the market with a crystal ball and constantly adjust yourself. I think that’s a recipe for failure, and certainly for making work that is less than great.

Lewandowski I see so many people doing that, they just flip and do something completely different because they're this or that isn't working for my sales. I don't blame anyone for doing that; if you can do that, then do it. But it doesn’t work for me.

Brooks We just have to find ways to keep going, to keep making what we want to make.

Lewandowski Every day. Every day there is so much self-propulsion.

Other Swans Conversation No. Nine

Ian Lewandowski (b. 1990) is a photographer from Northwest Indiana. His second solo exhibition in New York, The Colossus, was exhibited at CLAMP in 2024. The Ice Palace Is Gone, his body of large-format color portraits made from 2018-19, was published as his first monograph by Magic Hour Press (Montréal) in 2021. My Man Mitch, his body of photographs and photo-based material native to his home state of Indiana, was published by Kult Books (Stockholm) in 2022. His first film, Light Your Name, on the planetarium projector made famous by The Saint discotheque in NYC’s East Village (1980-1988), will premiere in summer 2026. Ian also teaches undergraduate photography courses at The New School and FIT, and continuing education courses at International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, and Gowanus Darkroom, a community photo lab and studio in Brooklyn. Ian’s work negotiates picture and body histories. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband Anthony and dog Seneca.