Timed Exposures

Photo: © Mike MandelI don't buy many photobooks these days- basically, I don't want more of what I've already bought the past fifty years. The other day however, I picked up a book at SFMOMA that made me smile, for a variety of reasons. I reveled in its nostalgia: classic 35mm, WA, B&W photos- the kind I grew up with, admired and made myself and... in its sense of humor! Mike Mandel's Myself: Timed Exposures is a book of selfies, but not as this generation knows and conceives of them, where the photographer, the person in charge, dominates every square millimeter of their... content creation. Mandel's photographs were considerably less calculated as to final outcome, and his mug did not overtake the foreground as do so many of today's selfies of the vanities. He would simply go out into the public, set the camera on tripod at the venue of his choosing, with the person or persons of his choosing (the vast majority, strangers), set the self timer, work his way into the photograph,…

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