People in Cars

People in Cars collects Mike Mandel's spontaneous close-up portraits of Los Angeles drivers and passengers, shot through open car windows at a single Van Nuys intersection. It is a study of the automobile as a stage for unguarded, fleeting encounter.

Mandel began the project around 1970, positioning himself at a busy corner on Victory Boulevard with a wide-angle 28mm lens on his 35mm camera, close enough to the glass that his subjects reacted in real time, with surprise, amusement, and occasional annoyance. Stanley/Barker's 2017 edition, produced with Robert Mann Gallery, gathers 34 duotone reproductions in a softback, Swiss-catalogue-bound volume, left unsequenced by narrative so each image stands as its own self-contained meeting between photographer and stranger.

Mandel (b. 1950) made his name in the 1970s alongside Larry Sultan on the conceptual road-trip project Evidence and the billboard series Seven Days, and has continued to treat vernacular American subjects (baseball cards, driver's-ed manuals, freeway culture) as material for photographic play. People in Cars revisits this early, largely unpublished body of work decades later, restoring an overlooked chapter of his California period.