soft cover with french folds
11.75 x 8.25”
80 pages, 70 duotones
with an essay by Mike Mandel
ISBN 978-0-918290-19-9
$50 signed
INTRODUCTION
This definitive edition of Mike Mandel’s first book from
1972 includes 31 new photographs from his archive for a total
of 70 pictures. The photographs are produced here in high
resolution and printed at a large scale never before published
until now.
Inspired by Lee Friedlander’s self-portraits and the hu-
morous and innocent pictures made by Jacques Henri Lartigue,
Mike Mandel set out to make Myself: Timed Exposures in 1971
as a 20-year old undergraduate. He attached his 35mm camera
to a tripod and walked around looking for situations to insert
himself and create a picture. Mandel set a 10-second mechani-
cal self-timer, and stepped into public space. “People, strangers
to me, would be jarred for a moment from their routine and
their perceived public isolation. I was standing uncomfortably
close next to them, an abandoned camera buzzing a few feet
away. I might say something or nothing at all. And suddenly,
click, the machine had made its own decisive moment.”
The work explores chance, social encounters, and the joy
of playfulness in public spaces. The project is an early ancestor
to contemporary participatory selfies and photobombing.
SAMPLE PAGES
REVIEWs
NewYorker, Mike Mandel's Selfies from the Seventies, by Emma Cline, October 12 2020
"Looking at (these photographs) is an exercise in nostalgia not only for the languid California of the early seventies, or the looseness offered by working in a medium that had little respect from the art world and therefore no money, but for a moment when, even if only in the world of these images, the encounter between self and stranger could be guileless. Mandel’s photographs have so much of the lost pleasure of living in a city in them, of participating in the random crisscrossing of humanity, of disparate selves united even briefly in time and place."