Mike Mandel

Mike Mandel (born 1950) is an American conceptual artist and photographer.

According to his artist profile, his work "questions the meaning of photographic imagery within popular culture and draws from snapshots, advertising, news photographs, and public and corporate archives."

Most of the publications Mandel has been involved with have been self-published: his own, his early conceptual collaborations with Larry Sultan, and his later collaborations with Chantal Zakari.

Mandel was born in 1950 in Los Angeles (LA), and grew up in the San Fernando Valley.

Mandel is quoted: "I liked Studs Terkel’s books, and as an artist I thought that it didn’t matter what the subject matter might be, but that an artist would approach the project with a more open ended attitude. Of course, I was a Giants fan since I was eight, in 1958, so I grew up with the team in San Francisco."

Larry Sultan and Mandel first met as MFA students at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Over the next thirty years, their artistic partnership produced an impressive body of work as well as a lifelong friendship.

The two collaborated on Billboards, 15 different subvertising series displayed on billboards throughout California and elsewhere in the USA; as well as various conceptual books.

The 1970s was an incredibly productive decade for Mandel.

Good 70s included People in Cars (1970), Myself: Timed Exposures (1971), Mike's Motels and Motel Postcards (1974), Mrs. Kilpatric (1974), Seven Never Before Published Portraits of Edward Weston (1974), The Baseball Photographer Trading Cards (1975), and a set of letters ostensibly written by Sandra S. Phillips, Curator Emerita at SFMOMA, to Mandel during the 1970s, Letters from Sandra. The letters are real, but the dates fictional as they were written by Phillips specifically for the 2015 publication of the box set as a tongue in cheek contextualizing device describing her feelings about Mandel's works in progress while at the same time providing a running commentary on the Watergate scandal.

For People in Cars Mandel found a street corner near his home in Van Nuys, California, and in the late afternoon light, using a wide-angle lens, he photographed people making right hand turns, often capturing the images of drivers and passengers in the front and back seats.

Mandel self-published Myself: Timed Exposures while still an undergraduate in 1971, a book of thirty-six self-portraits made alongside strangers, using the camera's self-timer.

There was a measure of chance involved in making the photos as Mandel would identify a potential photographic opportunity, set up the tripod and camera and walk into the picture during the 10 second delay.

Mandel and his girlfriend at the time, Alison Woolpert, began collecting postcards from sleazy little motels, but Mandel eventually started taking pictures himself, taking the viewer on a sort of ghostly tour of long-gone 70s design and road culture." "These photos have a clear haunting and glowing, lonesome appeal you just can’t shake.

You can just imagine the kids of the early 60’s escaping to these motels for vacation and kicks but now these destinations have turned into places where people go to become ghosts."

He was a student at San Fernando Valley State College, northwest of LA, then moved up the coast to San Francisco in 1973 for graduate studies at San Francisco Art Institute.

Between 1973 and 1989, Sultan and Mandel created fifteen unique designs for billboards installed in over ninety sites, mostly in California.

They appropriated images and text from postcards, illustrated books, and magazine advertisements, replacing traditional slogans with unclear messages and nonsensical symbols.

For Sultan and Mandel, the billboard evoked their media-rich hometown, Los Angeles, while offering a platform that could engage unsuspecting audiences in a typically passive and commercial context.

One billboard reads "Oranges On Fire" atop an illustration of flaming citrus fruits without any rhyme or reason.

In 1974 Mandel self-published his conceptual art piece, Seven Never Before Published Portraits of Edward Weston, a book of responses to questionnaires he sent to various men named Edward Weston, along with their photographs and letters.

In 1974 Mandel and Alison Woolpert, traveled across America, making portraits in the style of baseball cards of 134 photographers and curators.

These included Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Harry Callahan, Minor White, Aaron Siskind, William Eggleston, Ed Ruscha, and John Szarkowski.

They also collected personal statistics and comments.

Mandel then created a set of baseball cards and sold them through museums and galleries, in packs of 10, at a dollar a pack.

He is best known for Evidence (1977), a book of found photographs he and Sultan assembled, regarded as "one of the most influential photography titles of the past 50 years"; and for his Baseball Photographer Trading Cards (1975), a set of baseball cards with 134 different photographers and curators posing as ball players.

Mandel has had a solo exhibition at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and his work is in the permanent collections of major institutions.

Evidence (1977) is "a book of photographs sourced from scientific, industrial, police, military and other archives", over one hundred of which across the USA they visited and scoured for material.

As a whole, the book suggests a mysterious atmosphere of an unexplained technologically driven, dehumanizing future.

And this idea was made all the more potent because the photographs were not imagined or set up by the artists.

Mandel and Sultan consider these found images as "documents" that came right from these centers of technology.

Sean O'Hagan wrote in The Observer that Evidence is "now regarded as one of the most influential photography titles of the past 50 years"; Liz Jobey wrote in the Financial Times that it "is recognised as one of the signal works of contemporary photography".

Marty Appel> writes in Sports Collectors Digest: SF Giants Oral History about the book Mandel self-published in 1979 about his favorite baseball team, the San Francisco Giants.

Before he turned 21 Mandel completed People in Cars and Myself: Timed Exposures among a number of conceptual photography projects, many of them self-published in book form that were later (2015) collected and re-published as a boxed edition of facsimile books and objects entitled Good 70s, edited by Mandel, Jason Fulford and Sharon Helgason Gallagher The publication led to a recognition of his 1970s projects in two concurrent solo exhibitions, one at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the other at Robert Mann Gallery in New York City, both in 2017.

In March, 2015, SFMOMA made a video interview of Mandel describing his 70s projects including The Baseball Photographer Trading Cards.

Randy Kennedy wrote in The New York Times that it "became a watershed in the history of art photography"; and Source in 2016 named it the second greatest photobook of all time (second only to Robert Frank's The Americans).

Good 70s included a poster of this work, but a more extensive book was published in 2017 by Stanley/Barker, UK, and Robert Mann Gallery

Paul Sorene on October 18, 2017, quotes Mandel in his Flashbak article, about his project where he regularly photographed a middle aged housewife who lived down the street from him in Santa Cruz, California in 1974.

Boardwalk Minus Forty is a look back at life on the beach, created during the artist's time living in Santa Cruz, California while a student at the San Francisco Art Institute.

The book was published in 2017 by TBW Books as part of Series #5, one of a four book set that included books by Susan Meiselas, Bill Burke and Lee Friedlander.