Harold Allen 1975

This is Mike Mandel’s Harold Allen. It’s a photograph and text on a card stock. It’s all about surface here, isn’t it? I'm interested in this as a kind of everyday portraiture. It has the kind of feeling as when someone just picks up a brush and gets on with it. This is a picture, that feels like it was not fussed over. The gray jacket, the cap, that kind of aging man seriousness - all that is interesting, but then the addition of the baseball bat brings this piece into another realm. He’s outside, maybe in his garden. Harold is in a batting stance, but he looks like he's about to fall over! The black and white adds to the sense of a kind of suburban, everyman melancholy. It’s got a certain unpretentious, honest quality. Like, this is just Harold. Take it or leave it. It makes me think a little of Bernd and Hilla Becher, but they were a bit more formal. Harold Allen just seems like a regular guy, immortalized in a moment of suburban baseball fantasy.