The Ice Palace is Gone – Ian Lewandowski

There’s a wall in Ian Lwandowski’s studio on the southside of Brooklyn’s  Prospect Park that’s coated in pictures, postcards and memorabilia – each collected with magpie-like zeal. Right now, it features an unfinished sketch of a sailor from a show his friend put on at The Drawing Center, a photograph of someone stretching his covid mask almost to a breaking point, and pages from an old calendar about hairdressers he found on eBay. But it’s an image from an Instagram account sharing photographs of an iconic gay club on Fire Island that was partially burnt down which inspired his new book, The Ice Palace is Gone.
“A lot of the things I was thinking about around that time were to do with safety,” the photographer says. This idea that certain spaces can make you feel validated, while also being “very susceptible to being destroyed.”

It was this kind of thinking that prompted Lewandowski to start, in 2018, photographing friends and acquaintances in the places where they felt safe – bedrooms, studies, partners’ homes, dining rooms..- in clothes that they thought would enhance and empower them.
The Ice Palace is Gone collects all these images, telling us stories of intimacy, love, self-confidence and pride within networks of care and community in queer spaces.