If you’re looking for the origin story of MISTER LYNCH, don’t start with the Vatican, or a Chelsea studio, or even a stadium-side photo pit where Bowie once leaned too close to his lens. Start in a janitor’s closet. Ellsworth, Maine. Population: 5,157. A kid with a camera and no school arts program. Just chemicals, darkness, and a makeshift enlarger humming under a flickering light.

“I built my first darkroom at thirteen,” Lynch says. “They cut the funding, so I made my own space.”

That space, that insistence on making room when none was given, has followed him for decades. Through ad agencies and gallery walls, through the blurred lines between art and commerce, Lynch has never stopped carving out a corner—however small—to create. To experiment. To embrace the scatter.

He got his start shooting concerts, sneaking backstage before he could legally drive. By his teens, he had already formed his own business—Instilled Images—and was capturing artists like R.E.M. and the Grateful Dead with an intimacy that felt less like fan worship and more like communion. His archive, NOISEMAKERS, holds these moments: raw, unguarded, human.

“They trusted me because I didn’t shoot like a fan,” he says. “I shot like someone who understood what it meant to perform.”

That instinct—for the moment behind the mask—would become his signature.

In Rome, Lynch found his way inside the Vatican, photographing Pope John Paul II in ways the AP wire never could. The series, Five Months, Five Thousand Memories, is less about papal pomp than human proximity—small gestures, shared glances, the way faith lives in the crowd, not just the pulpit. He spoke the language, walked the neighborhoods, fell in love with the people.

“Italian taught me to listen visually,” he says. “Everything became more layered.”

Back in the States, that listening caught the attention of Young & Rubicam, one of the first agencies to embrace digital photography. They tapped Lynch to help build their digital studio from the ground up. He was nineteen. “Tech, creativity, and commerce were all colliding,” he recalls. “It was wild. Nobody really knew what the rules were yet, so we just made them up.”

But Lynch doesn’t do well with walls—or ceilings. After a few years, he left Y&R, gut-renovated a loft in SoHo, and launched his own studio. That led to CROSSED EYE STUDIOS in Chelsea’s Art District, a hybrid space where ad campaigns collide with gallery work, and commercial shoots share wall space with sculptural installations.

“CROSSED EYE lets me work in both lanes,” he says. “I can shoot a national campaign in the morning and sculpt a stop-motion brass installation in the afternoon. It’s not about separation—it’s about integration.”

Lynch’s visual language is bold but never bombastic. Emotional but never sentimental. His post-9/11 campaign Dancing in the Streets—shot for a client, later shown in museums—captures New York not in mourning, but in motion. People mid-step, laughing, defiant. It doesn’t push hope—it just lets it breathe.

His multi-year campaign for GAF, one of the nation’s largest roofing companies, might be the best argument for how commercial photography can double as social portraiture. Factory workers. Roofers. Line crews. Shot in their own environments, with dignity, grit, and cinematic light. “I wanted to show the poetry in labor,” Lynch says. “The faces we usually pass by.”

Then came The Newfounds. A surrealist turn that feels like something Wes Anderson might dream up after reading too much Sontag. Tiny white figures, navigating human-scale environments—a cracked egg, a typewriter ribbon, a puddle. Each image is hand-constructed, not Photoshopped. They are meditations on displacement, wonder, and how absurd the everyday can be when seen from the outside. The Museum of Arts and Design awarded Lynch a residency for the series.

“It started as a joke,” he admits. “I glued one little guy to a coffee mug. But then I realized—I was building a mythology. A civilization trying to understand our mess.”

But Lynch’s work is not some ephemeral meditation on society. It’s real, tactile, heavy. It’s brass shadowboxes etched with slogans (“There Is No Delete in Life”), skateboard decks screen-printed with concert portraits, contact sheets blown up to four feet tall, markings and all. His Sumo Contact Sheets preserve the raw bones of analog photography, a reverent nod to craft in an era of filters and deletes.

“I want people to see the process—the doubt, the edits, the fuckups,” he says. “That’s where the soul lives.”

And there’s soul everywhere. In NATIVE TO THIS LAND, a portrait series documenting Native American regalia and resilience. In REVISIONS, where he staged identity portraits alongside Warhol’s Superstars. In his Warhol’s Factory commission, which helped launch the city’s first official Warhol Week.

But ask Lynch what he’s proudest of and he doesn’t mention Pope photos or gallery walls.

“I’ve stayed creatively independent,” he says. “That’s the win. I make work that moves people—not just markets.”

That includes high-profile ad campaigns for Sony, Bud Light, the NFL, and the Jamaican Olympic Bobsled Team—produced with the same emotional intention as his fine art.

And when asked what defines his approach?

“Storytelling,” he says without pause. “Always. Even if it’s a shoe or a soda, there’s a story in it. A reason someone should care.”

Lynch’s camera doesn’t flinch. It doesn’t posture. It doesn’t try to impress you. It just shows up—fully, honestly—and waits for you to do the same.

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His limited-edition prints sell in the thousands. His Thought Threads silkscreens and wearable slogans sell in dozens of formats. And his one-of-one contact sheets are marked not just with grease pencil and chinagraph, but with the years they came from—when image-making still felt like risk.

“Everything I do is trying to touch that same nerve I felt in that janitor’s closet,” he says. “That if you want it badly enough, you make it happen. You build the darkroom. You shoot the shot. You figure it out.”

And maybe that’s the core of MISTER LYNCH: a career built not on a single style, but on singular insistence. On being present. On seeing the unseen. On turning labor into lyric. On finding a way.

“I’m not afraid to embrace the scatter,” he says. “That’s where all the good stuff hides.”

And maybe that’s where it’s always been. In the space between the seen and the felt. Between the real and the surreal. In the crack where light leaks in and art begins.

Welcome to the world of MISTER LYNCH. Bring your eyes. And your questions. The rest will follow.

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