With photographs by Ansel Adams. Text by Erin O'Toole.
"Zone Eleven is the kind of photobook that simmers with so much intelligence that you’ll want to push it on Adams fans and skeptics with nearly equal enthusiasm. It thoughtfully asks us to question not only what we think we know about Adams, but also to broadly consider the many ways a photograph can function." –Loring Knoblauch, Collector Daily
Hbk, 11 x 9 in. / 112 pgs / 83 duotone. | 11/30/2021 | In stock $55.00
Published by Damiani. With photographs by Ansel Adams. Text by Erin O'Toole.
A New York Times Book Review 2021 holiday gift guide pick
“Zone Eleven” alludes to Ansel Adams’ Zone System, a method for controlling exposure of the negative in order to obtain a full range of tonality in the photographic print—from the deepest black of Zone 0 to the brightest highlight in Zone 10. “Zone Eleven” is a metaphor coined by artist Mike Mandel in his challenge to create a book of Adams’ photographs outside of the bounds of his personal work. Many of these photographs were found in the archives of Adams' commercial and editorial assignments, and from his experimentation with the new Polaroid material of the times. For this book, Mandel has unearthed images that are unexpected for Adams, and created a new context of facing-page relationships and sequence. Zone Eleven is the product of Mandel’s research into over 50,000 Adams images located within four different archives, from which he presents a body of Adams’ work that was largely unknown until now. Mike Mandel is well known for his collaboration with Larry Sultan from the 1970s to the 1990s. They published Evidence in 1977, a collection of 59 photographs chosen from more than two million images that the artists viewed at the archives of government agencies and tech-oriented corporations. Conceptually, Zone Eleven is a companion book to Evidence. As Evidence reframes the institutional documentary photograph with new context and meaning, Zone Eleven responds to the audience expectation of “the iconic Ansel Adams nature photograph.” But Mandel selects images that do not fit that expectation. Zone Eleven is a book of Ansel Adams images that surprisingly speak to issues of social relations, the built environment and alienation.
Published by D.A.P./J&L Books. Edited by Mike Mandel, Jason Fulford, Sharon Helgason Gallagher. Text by Sandra S. Phillips.
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.
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers. Text by Charlotte Cotton, Connie Lewallen, Thomas Wagner, Carter Ratcliff, Jonathan Lethem.
The artistic collaboration between Larry Sultan (1946-2009) and Mike Mandel (born 1950) began in 1972, when they were both graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute. Over the next 30 years, they created 20 photographic projects: two publications (including the landmark book Evidence); two exhibitions; the film, JPL; three public commissions; and 12 billboard series displayed on sites throughout California and the continental U.S. This collaboration enabled Sultan and Mandel to evolve a seemingly authorless style; most of their works adapted found imagery from archives or from popular media, neutralizing the intended commercial or documentary content by uncovering and emphasizing the inherent banality.
This substantial overview surveys Sultan and Mandel's 30 years of collaboration beginning with early billboard projects investigating themes of Californian culture and wealth, such as "Oranges on Fire" and "Cornucopia", based on a 1955 hand-tinted postcard of a model posing amid ripe oranges, and bearing the tagline: "California Gold Fills the Horn of Plenty To Overflowing." Their billboard projects continue with the tongue in cheek Ties and Whose News? in which the secondary title, "Whose News Abuses You?" is slyly imbedded in the image; and the duo's final billboard collaboration, Trouble Spots, a billboard project that used conflated and opposing ideologies in both fictitious and real locations.
Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel continues this extensive overview by chronicling their work with sourced images in the exhibitions Replaced (1975); Newsroom (1983); and the publications How to Read Music in One Evening (1974) and Evidence (1977). Five critical essays provide further insights on their collaboration.
The State of Ata addresses the social themes that define contemporary Turkey. Specifically examining the imagery of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the country's revolutionary leader after World War I, the volume interweaves photographs, interviews, artists' interventions and archival imagery. The result is a complex visual exploration of the uses of Atatürk's imagery and the way in which it functions in contemporary Turkish society as a perceived link to Western culture, and as a symbol in opposition to the rise of the Islamist political movement. Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari conceived The State of Ata as a collection of books within a book—a photograph album, a volume of military portraits, a diary—and the result is a unique project that will appeal not only to those fascinated by Turkish culture, but also to anyone interested in the popular representations of cult historical figures.
PUBLISHER Eighteen Publications
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 8.25 x 9.5 in. / 272 pgs / 393 color / 9 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 4/30/2010 Active
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2010 p. 94
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780918290106TRADE List Price: $45.00 CDN $60.00 GBP £40.00
AVAILABILITY In stock
in stock $45.00
Free Shipping
UPS GROUND IN THE CONTINENTAL U.S. FOR CONSUMER ONLINE ORDERS
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers. Essays by Sandra Philips and Robert Forth.
In 1977, photographers Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel sifted through thousands of photographs in the files of the Bechtel Corporation, the Beverly Hills Police Department, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, the U.S. 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 50 of the best, they printed these images with the care you would expect to find in a high-quality art photography book, publishing them in a simple, limited-edition volume titled Evidence. The concept for the book was clear: select photographs intended to be used as objective evidence and show that it is never that simple. Now an undisputed classic in the photo world, considered a seminal harbinger of conceptual photography, Evidence is nearly impossible to find. This new edition is being published in recognition of the project's continued relevance, and will contain a facsimile copy of the original book plus a newly commissioned scholarly essay by Sandra Phillips of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Additionally, this edition will include 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.
Published by ARTBOOK | DIGITAL. Essays by Sandra Philips and Robert Forth.
In 1977, photographers Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel sifted through thousands of photographs in the files of the Bechtel Corporation, the Beverly Hills Police Department, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, the U.S. 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 50 of the best, they printed these images with the care you would expect to find in a high-quality art photography book, publishing them in a simple, limited-edition volume titled Evidence. The concept for the book was clear: select photographs intended to be used as objective evidence and show that it is never that simple. Now an undisputed classic in the photo world, considered a seminal harbinger of conceptual photography, the first edition of Evidence is nearly impossible to find.
In recognition of the project's continued relevance D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers published a new edition in 2004, which also sold out quickly and is no longer available. Containing a facsimile copy of the original book plus a newly commissioned scholarly essay by Sandra Phillips of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the D.A.P. edition included 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. This is the eBook edition of the 2004 Evidence.
Mike Mandel: Good 70s
Larry Sultan & Mike Mandel
Mike Mandel & Chantal Zakari: The State of Ata
Larry Sultan & Mike Mandel: Evidence
Larry Sultan & Mike Mandel: Evidence eBook