The inner landscapes of Rose Mandel

Jul 25, 2024

This is another edition of my newsletter where I write about a female photographer whose work I admire. The whole series can be found here.

The California School of Fine Arts (CSFA)1 in San Francisco was the first school in the United States to establish a Department of Photography teaching and promoting photography as fine art. Renowned photographer Ansel Adams was hired as the head of the department and in 1946, Adams and his colleague Minor White began to teach their first classes.

Photography students had the fortune not only to learn from Adams and White but also to study under other important photographers like Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cunningham, Lisette Model, as well as Nancy and Beaumont Newhall.

One of the students who enrolled at the CSFA to study photography in 1946 was Rose Mandel (1910-2002). Born in Poland, she had fled Europe during World War II and after a short stay in New York, settled in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Before she came to the US, she had studied art in Paris and child education and psychology in Geneva. Both, the tragic life events and her formal education would later have a big influence on her photography.2

“Untitled” (Jerrold Davies) from the sequence “The errand of the eye” (circa 1955) by Rose Mandel.

After her studies at the CSFA, Mandel worked as a senior photographer for the Art Department at the University of California in Berkeley from 1947 to 1967. She continued working on her own photographic projects until 1972.3

Although Mandel never actively promoted or tried to sell her photographs, she showed her work at different solo- and group exhibitions. Her first solo show in 1948 at the San Francisco Museum of Art called “On Walls and Behind Glass”, showcased a sequence of photographs of storefronts, signage, and windows incorporating their reflections which gave the photographs a surreal and abstract feeling. Years later, Mandel acknowledged the surrealist elements in her photographs as an expression of the devastation she still felt thinking of the war and the Holocaust.4

On walls and behind glass #8 #20 and #17 by Rose Mandel, 1947.

In 1954, Mandel had another solo exhibition titled "The Errand of the Eye” which was presented at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The title refers to the poem “Whether my bark went down at sea” by Emily Dickinson. A mystical poem that tells the story of a ghostly boat sailing the ocean.

Mandel’s sequence of 49 photographs dating from 1951 to 1954 consisted of contact prints mostly of delicate nature still lives: flowers, weeds, grasses, and twigs. All photographed in a way that most of the subject and the background is soft and obscured, leaving only small details in focus.

Addy Bhasin describes Mandel’s photographs and the feeling they evoke in the following way:

“These reflections of nature meditate on feelings of stillness and space that are inherent even in denser pieces that feature entangled vegetation or ambiguous water scenes. (…) Mandel’s series of photos invokes a similar mood to the one conjured here by Dickinson — one of an evocative, imaginary presence. The spatial ambiguity and discord of Mandel’s works, especially her multiple exposures, fit perfectly with the haunting elements of Dickinson’s poem. Like the poem’s enchanted ship, Rose Mandel’s photographs — whether they be urbanscapes, natural shots or portraits — are mystic, moving and perfectly uncertain.”5

Page 124-133 from the Aperture Magazine Vol. 4, No. 4, 1956.

Like the writer and photographer Minor White, who was Mandel’s mentor at the CSFA and her friend of many years, Mandel used photography to explore complex symbolic meanings. Photography was to both more than mere representation of what they saw. To capture the essence and the deeper truths of their subjects was just as important.

In 1954, White wrote about Mandel’s work:

Text by Minor White for the exhibition “The Errand of the Eye: Photographs by Rose Mandel. From the Rose Mandel archive.

After creating the sequence “The Errand of the Eye”, Mandel kept making landscape and nature studies focussing mainly on abstract waterscapes. Looking at her work and the years they were made, it appears they become darker and visually more entangled than her earlier work.

In the first, and only ever published monograph of Mandel’s work “The Errand of the Eye - Photographs by Rose Mandel” which was published in 2013, curator Susan Ehrens points out that “in surrealist art, images of the natural landscape like these call attention to primal and final stages of life”.6

Here are a few of my favorite photographs by Rose Mandel in chronological order:

Selected photographs from the years 1946 to 1966 by Rose Mandel. Culled from the book "The errand of the Eye - Photographs by Rose Mandel" by Susan Ehrens (2013)

I discovered Mandel’s work in 2022 while flipping through the book “The Golden Decade: Photography at the California School of Fine Arts 1945-1955“ which features over thirty former students of the CSFA. Rose Mandel’s work caught my eye for different reasons.

Firstly, (which didn’t come to me as a surprise) I see the influences of her teachers in her work. Minor White and Edward Weston are two photographers whose work I admire.

Secondly, her work has a certain stillness, sensuality and sometimes even a melancholic feeling to it, that makes me reflect on my own inner landscape. This is a quality in a photograph I seek to create myself - and probably most photographers do - and which her photos perfectly are capable of.

I try not to compare my photography to the work of others, but I can’t help but notice that I am often drawn to photographs that are similar to my own work, or to photographs that are speaking to me on a deeper level than just their visual qualities.

Rose Mandel’s photographs do exactly that for me. I hope you find her work interesting too!

That’s it from me today.

Thank you for being here and for reading this week’s newsletter. It means a lot to me!

Susanne

Were you familiar with Rose Mandel and her work? What do you think about her photographs? Are they more than just visually pleasing to you (if at all)? Please share your thoughts in the comments with me. I would love to hear from you!

My Morning Muse

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