Headlands: The Marin coast at the Golden Gate

by Mike Mandel, Larry Sultan, Mark Klett

history/photo-text work

134 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1989

About the author

Mike Mandel grew up in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles during a period of expansion and transformation of the landscape that included the appearance of billboards, strip malls, and miles of freeways. This experience informs much of his work which questions the meaning of photographic imagery within popular culture and draws from snapshots, advertising, news photographs, and public and corporate archives. Much of this work resulted in self-published artist's books including Myself: Timed Exposures (1971), Seven Never Before Published Portraits of Edward Weston (1974), The Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards (1975), and Making Good Time (1989).

In 1977, Mandel and Larry Sultan collaborated on the seminal photographic book Evidence, a book comprised of file photographs from engineering, corporate and government agencies. Over a period of twenty-five years, Mandel and Sultan designed both temporary (billboards) and permanent (tile mosaic) artworks specifically for public sites. Their collaboration has been documented in a recent monograph Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel (2012).

A publication of Mandel’s 1970s conceptual projects Good 70s was published in 2015. Since the early '90s Mandel's work has worked extensively on public art projects transforming photographic imagery into large scale glass and ceramic tile mosaic murals. Mandel's recent projects have been in collaboration with his wife, Chantal Zakari. Their book, The State of Ata (2010) speaks to the clash between Islam and secularism in Turkey. Their book They Came to Baghdad (2012) is a response to the Iraq War, and Lockdown Archive (2015) is a record of all the images uploaded to the web that relate to the military occupation of Watertown after the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013.

Reviews

[Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book on the Marin Headlands, a former military base and now a park, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. I collaborated on this book with writer Paul Metcalf and photographers Mark Klett, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel. I designed and typeset the book and we all participated in conceptualizing it, picking photos and putting it all together. I sometimes show up as "the" author only because my name is first alphabetically, but it was a group project. Paul assembled the text based on his own interviews, observations and a collage of previously published material. Larry and Mike found a lot of historical and documentary photographs and Mark took some wonderful pictures and re-photographed some of the same pictures Larry and Mike found from the same locations to document the changes in the landscape.

[Mills College Library]

979.462 H4332 1989