Untitled 1974

Mike Mandel made this untitled photograph, sometime in the twentieth century, using gelatin silver to fix the image. It’s all about angles here, isn't it? We're looking down, maybe from a ski lift, at a beach filled with tiny people. The composition is wild; the perspective squashes everything, turning the beach into an abstract field. It feels casual, like a snapshot, but it's also carefully framed, making us question what we’re seeing. The high contrast gives the sand a gritty, tactile feel, almost like an aerial landscape. The shadows of the ski lift carve up the space, dividing the sunbathers into zones of light and dark. It’s disorienting. Mandel reminds me of Lee Friedlander, both playing with seeing and the way images can mess with our perceptions. This photograph embraces ambiguity, offering a view that's both familiar and strange, mundane and surreal.