Good 70s

Good 70s collects Mike Mandel's photographic and conceptual projects from the decade in which he emerged as one of the sharpest observers of American vernacular culture, working at the border between documentary photography and conceptual art.

Edited with Jason Fulford, Sharon Helgason Gallagher, and Sandra S. Phillips, the book was published by J&L Books with D.A.P. It gathers Mandel's baseball-card-style portraits of fellow photographers, trading cards he produced and distributed as a wry send-up of the art world's cult of personality, alongside his other 1970s series. Some editions were issued together with a reproduction pack of ten of the original photographer trading cards.

Mandel (b. 1950) is best known for "Evidence" (1977), made with Larry Sultan from appropriated industrial and government photographs, a landmark of conceptual photobook-making. His work of the period consistently treated photography's institutional forms, the trading card, the archive photograph, the survey, as material to be redirected toward humor and critique.