Nick Hlobeczy 1975

Curator: This gelatin-silver print, created in 1975 by Mike Mandel, presents a portrait of a man named Nick Hlobeczy. Editor: There’s an everyday quality to it that really strikes me. The plain background, the almost card-like presentation…it feels both familiar and oddly vulnerable. Curator: I agree, and that’s where its strength lies. Mandel's work often touches upon the notion of the everyday individual and questions around representation within broader social contexts of the 70s. Consider, who was Nick Hlobeczy, and why was he memorialized in this way? Editor: Absolutely, it raises important questions about how identities are constructed and documented. Look at the baseball cap – a simple item loaded with meaning about American identity, perhaps also class, leisure, aspirations... I see a negotiation of masculinity, maybe a critique of traditional portraiture. Curator: The image definitely captures a specific cultural moment, reflecting working-class portraiture norms and styles. The subject’s baseball cap and even his glasses can reflect particular attitudes present in post-war America and what types of imagery had social cache. We should remember that photographic images became an important source for sociology interested in modern daily-life studies. Editor: Precisely. It feels like it wants to be accessible, inviting discourse about how photographic practices intersect with societal expectations of representation, almost bordering documentary aesthetics, which themselves have a political edge to them, don’t you think? Curator: Most definitely. We have to recognize the photograph as a constructed object with complex ideological undertones. The photograph becomes a form of discourse between viewer, author and subject within existing sociopolitical relationships of power. Editor: It’s such a compelling and thought-provoking image that asks a lot of difficult but fascinating questions, both about portraiture itself and societal values from the decade the picture was created in. Curator: I find that it shows how an apparent ‘simple’ object, a single photographic portrait, is often a loaded vessel for social commentary and insight when critically observed.