In the early 70s a young Mike Mandel spent his days documenting drivers in and around L.A. 46 years on, his charming images are finally available as a covetable new photo book
One day in 1970, while out scouting material for a class project, 19-year-old photography student Mike Mandel, began shooting pictures of people in their cars as they cruised around the streets of Los Angeles. “I don’t exactly remember why,” the feted image-maker, now 66, tells us over the phone from his home in Massachusetts. “I know that Walker Evans often included cars, and other types of technology, in his work as a clever way of talking about a specific period of time in America. And then Robert Frank did the same thing 20 years later, with updated icons of American culture, again including cars.” Having grown up in the L.A. suburbs, cars had also formed a major part of Mandel’s upbringing, he explains, and thus proved a comfortable subject. “They were the only way to get from one place to another; nowhere was in walking distance,” he laughs. “Until my teens I possessed this alternate sense of geography. I never knew which way was north or south, I just knew which freeway you took, and which off-ramp to use to get places.”
After taking a few pictures that he “thought were pretty interesting”, and following a compliment from his icon Robert Frank, who paid a visit to Mandel’s class around that time and noted how “difficult” it was to capture such shots, the young photographer became unstoppable. He found a spot on the corner of Victory Boulevard and Coldwater Canyon Avenue and stood there in the late afternoons, “with the light low in the west”, waiting for his subjects to present themselves. “It was fun and easy; I enjoyed that things kept changing in front of me” he says. “When people were making turns I’d lean in and there would be this sudden interaction. They could respond in whatever ways they wanted.”
These, as it turned out, varied greatly, the resulting photographs – taken over the course of “at least a year” and occupying some 60 rolls of film – spanning a wonderful array of reactions. A grandmother with a braided bun and dark glasses scowls through a crack in her window; a middle-aged couple beam delightedly, the woman waving with both hands; two young boys in a backseat stare with a mixture of confusion and intrigue; while in one memorable shot a handsome 20-something, his aviators perched atop his head, reaches out of the window in an attempt to grab the camera. Mandel is a master of composition and light, each black-and-white image demanding a closer look as new reflections (of palm trees or gas stations) and little details (a face in the shadows, a pendant hanging from the rearview mirror) reveal themselves.
Now, 46 years on, Mandel has compiled his favourite works from the series into a brand new photo book, published by Stanley/Barker and dubbed simply People in Cars. “It’s nice to revisit work made when I was that young, and to rearrange and rediscover a lot of pictures I didn’t really appreciate back then,” he reflects on the process. “It still seems very contemporary to me somehow.” That said, he still very much acknowledges the work as “a timepiece”, the idea of trying to take such photographs now inducing a warm chuckle. “It was outside of people’s regular experiences in the 70s. It was surprising that I was there taking a picture and they’d respond to it as if it were a funny thing that had happened in their day. Now everybody is taking pictures all the time, and of course there’s social media, which makes some people feel uncomfortable. If I tried to do something like this today, people would probably stop their car, get out and try to hit me!” And it’s true: in an age where we find ourselves bombarded by images from all sides, these brilliant pictures, documenting the sheer surprise and bemusement of being caught on camera, boast a bygone charm.
People in Cars by Mike Mandel is available from May 12, 2017, published by Stanley/Barker in collaboration with Robert Mann.
