Mike Mandel

Libro del 1977 che ha contribuito a dar forma ai successivi 40 anni di fotografia almeno tanto quanto le quasi contemporanee esposizioni e libri dei "New topographics" e di William Eggleston. Al centro di questo lavoro è l’uso concettuale dell’immagine d’archivio e l’elevazione dell’opera di “editing” a un valore forse più grande di quello delle immagini stesse (impensabili, senza quest’opera, autori come Jason Fulford). In più, un libro che senza voler essere politico lo è, nel suo presentarsi come critica della tecnocrazia e del dominio dell’uomo sulla natura. Capolavoro della storia della fotografia.… (más)

Mike Mandel grew up in the San Fernando Valley, and as an kid in the 1950s could walk just about everywhere he needed to go: to school, or later down the street to the open field to collect rocks or catch lizards. All of his friends lived on his block, so he didn’t think too much about the time he spent in a car. But by the time he reached twenty in 1970, he realised how large a role the car would play in his life, and so began to photograph the inhabitants of 1970s California in their cars.

“On a late afternoon with the light low in the west I’d regularly find my spot on the corner of Victory Blvd. and Coldwater Canyon Ave. in Van Nuys (ironically, so close to home I could easily walk there). It was a busy intersection with a wealth of cars pulling my way to make a right turn. I was using a 28mm wide angle lens on my 35mm camera, which meant that I had to get in pretty close to the window to get my shot, and when I did there would inevitably be a reaction: surprise, amusement, and on some few occasions, annoyance.”

“In contrast to how this project might play out today, it seemed then that people enjoyed being recognised by the camera and readily participated in the playfulness of the moment. It was warm outside, the car windows were open. It was the window that framed and instilled these portraits with the language of the automobile environment.” — Mike Mandel… (más)

A visual conundrum of incalculable mystery. ―Martin Parr, The Photobook: A History

In 1977, photographers Larry Sultan (1946–2009) and Mike Mandel (born 1950) published a book that would radically transform both photography and the photobook canon―a book described by Martin Parr, in The Photobook: A History, as "one of the most beautiful, dense and puzzling photobooks in existence, an endless visual box of tricks." Sultan and Mandel sifted through thousands of photographs in the files of the Bechtel Corporation, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, the US Department of the Interior, Stanford Research Institute and a hundred other corporations, American government agencies and educational, medical and technical institutions. They were looking for photographs that were made and used as transparent documents and purely objective instruments―as evidence, in short.

Selecting 59 of the best, they published these images with the care you would expect to find in a high-quality art photography book, issuing them in 1977 in a simple, limited-edition volume titled Evidence.

Long established as a photobook classic and a seminal example of conceptual photography, Evidence was reissued as a facsimile edition in 2004 by D.A.P. with a new spread of images and a group of black-and-white illustrations selected by the artists from an archive of photographs that were not included in the original book, plus a commissioned essay by Sandra Phillips. Today both this reissue and the original 1977 publication are exceptionally rare and command high prices.

D.A.P. now reprints the 2004 edition of Evidence, making available to a general readership a truly pioneering and canonical photobook.… (más)

Mike Mandel is best known for his project Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards, as well as his collaborations with the late Larry Sultan. Mandel employs conceptual structures and social commentary underneath a playful presentation. For the Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards, Mandel traveled across the US in 1974, posing 134 photographers and curators as ball players, and photographing them. Participants included famous figures (Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Harry Callahan, Minor White, Aaron Siskind, William Eggleston, Ed Ruscha, John Szarkowski) as well as lesser-known artists. Cards were made of each participant, and included "stats" such as height, weight, home, favorite camera and a personal statement. The original cards were sold in packs of ten.

This boxed collection--published in a limited edition of 1,000 copies--contains facsimiles of Mandel's original publications, long out of print, including the Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards, Myself: Timed Exposures, Seven Never Before Seen Portraits of Edward Weston, plus previously unpublished work such as Motel Postcards, People in Cars and Mrs. Kilpatric, and ephemera from the projects, including selected facsimile contact sheets from the baseball photo shoots, a letter to Mandel from Charis Wilson regarding Edward Weston and a pack of ten of the original 1975 baseball cards.

Mike Mandel (born 1950) is an artist who has been working primarily with photography since the early 1970s. He teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and is a recent visiting lecturer in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard. A retrospective of his work is scheduled for 2017 at SFMOMA.… (más)