Peter Gowland 1975

Mike Mandel made this small photograph, called Peter Gowland, at some point in his life. It's a black and white image, kinda grainy, like a baseball card of a regular guy. I wonder what it was like for Mandel to take this shot. Maybe he spotted Gowland on the street, thought he had an interesting face, and asked to take his picture? There's a casualness to it, like a snapshot, but also a sense of deliberate composition in the way the light hits his face and the framing of his baseball glove. It makes me think of other artists working with found images, like Gerhard Richter, mining the everyday for something deeper. What’s great about photography is its ability to capture a specific moment, a fragment of time, and turn it into something that can be contemplated and reinterpreted endlessly. It’s a conversation between the artist, the subject, and the viewer, a game of catch that goes on and on.