Photographer · Veteran · New York
Ryan Mitchell is a New York–based photographer and United States military veteran whose practice is rooted in the intersection of personal memory, trauma, and the surreal. He holds a BFA in Film and Television from the Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA in Art Photography from Syracuse University.
Ryan’s work engages with images as a means of evoking the mystical and the surreal—reimagining lived experience through visual language that is at once intimate and expansive. His photographs do not document reality so much as they transform it, rendering psychological states as tangible, material presences.
His most recent body of work, Thank You, For Your Service? is a deeply personal excavation of memory shaped by his years of military service. The series navigates a difficult emotional terrain—frustration, anger, violence, and the eventual turn toward withdrawal and physical distress—tracing the internal landscape of a veteran’s psyche with unflinching honesty. These psychological states form the very architecture of the work’s visual grammar.
Central to Ryan’s practice is his engagement with archival materials: photographs, documents, and personal ephemeral that he manipulates with deliberate care. In doing so, he restores a sense of materiality and presence to histories that have been marginalized, overlooked, or sanitized. These objects carry emotional weight; they function simultaneously as tools of critique and instruments of healing. Through recontextualization, Ryan opens a creative space for acceptance, one that challenges prevailing social norms and invites a reconsideration of identity, trauma, and resilience within marginalized communities.
Within this practice, confrontation and remedy coexist. The work becomes a method of processing memory while forging new symbolic meanings through surreal, spiritual, and mystical frameworks—a form of image-making that is, at its core, an act of survival.
Exhibits:
Photoville Festival “Thank You for Your Service?” Exhibit, June 7- 22nd, 2025
Syracuse University MFA Thesis 2025 Unforeseen, March 21-28, 2025
First Time Outside” Totally Open Manifest Gallery, March 7th-April 4th 2025
“Waiting Area(s)” Choice 2025 Atlanta Photography Group Juried Exhibition, February 2025
“Thank You For Your Service?” PhotoNOLA's inaugural Photobook Grand Prize, December 2024
“First Time Outside,” Juror’s Choice, from Kristin Bloom, MFA, University of Montana-Missoula, Anything that Moves show, MFA Exhibition Online - University of Montana, December 2024
“Dirty Ride,” Emerging Vision: Biennial Student Show, December to January 2024
Hamidah Glasgow's Juror's Award “First Time Outside,” Center Forward 2024, Center for Fine Art Photography (C4FP), Fort Collins, Colorado, October 30 – November 23, 2024
“Self Portrait 1,” Candela Gallery UNBOUND13 Exhibit, July 5th, 2024
“Dirty Ride,” Medium Photo Size Matters Exhibit, San Diego at the Athenaeum Art Center, April 2024
Juror’s Choice, “Rest Break,” CONSTRUCTED IMAGES Exhibit, Praxis Gallery, November 2023
Publications:
Lenscratch’s Student Prize 2025: Top 25 to Watch
“Thank you For Your Service?” Photobook, 2024 BUP Book Award Shortlisted Artist
“Bustling Streets,” Draft 19 Magazine, RIT (Rochester Institute for Technology), April 2024
“Ended Locations and Dark Spaces 2” F-Stop Magazine Open Theme Issue, June 2023
Grants / Awards:
“Thank You, For Your Service?” Ten Years Out of Hand, Hand Magazine Finalist Publication Prize, February 2024
VPA Student Grant Program Fall Awards, Syracuse University, November 2024
Creative Opportunity Grant, Syracuse University, March 2024 and March 2025