Doug Prince 1975

Mike Mandel made this small black and white photograph, "Doug Prince", probably with a small camera, printing it as a small card. I wonder about the impulse to collect images of baseball players: the way the game has been enshrined in images and cards. Mandel would have been thinking about the way we immortalize people and turn them into heroes. It's a game but it's also business. It strikes me as more casual than that, though; he might have been in the stands one day and taken a snapshot himself. He’s focusing on the everyday and the forgotten, and using the readymade form of the baseball card, that’s usually emblazoned with logos and stats, to create something more personal and a little absurd. He invites us to think about fame and fandom.