CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/4/2021

Mike Mandel selects unknown Ansel Adams in 'Zone Eleven'

Featured image is reproduced from Mike Mandel: Zone Eleven, the new release from Damiani Books launching this weekend at Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore. Collecting conceptual photographer Mike Mandel's tight edit of 83 duotone images from a trove of more than 50,000 mostly previously-unseen, atypical early Ansel Adams photographs from four different archives, the release of this renegade photobook is definitely a publishing event in and of itself. "This book is a collaboration of sorts between Mandel and Adams," Erin O'Toole writes, "except that the photographs Mandel selected for inclusion were not sanctioned by Adams for this purpose, and are likely ones he himself never would have chosen. Adams shot the pictures, but Mandel has adopted them and given them new meaning through sequencing."

IMAGE CREDIT: "Miss Barbara August at Langley Porter Clinic, University of California, San Francisco," 1964. Sweeney/Rubin Ansel Adams Fiat Lux Collection, California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside. © Regents of the University of California.