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Zone Eleven. By Ansel Adams and Mike Mandel.
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Ansel Adams and Mike Mandel
Damiani, 2021. 112 pp., 83 illustrations, 11x9".
The following text was sent to us by Mike Mandel explaining in-depth, one page spread from his new book Zone Eleven.
On the left is an image of a woman who is seated. She is wearing mostly dark clothing. She has her legs crossed, and though the chair is at an angle, she turns her face toward the camera. We notice that Adams chose a perspective so that the woman sits nicely in front of a middle tone doorway, so she jumps out in black and white. But she’s not centered, the photograph also includes a large drawing of a young, full-frontal female nude on the wall above her shoulder. It is not professionally framed but is pinned to the wall with a cut-out mat of poster board. The woman is elderly, at least 70, what is her relationship to the nude? Could she be the artist, or the model, or perhaps just someone interested in art? There is a book lying on a table at the right, and we can make out upside-down BOTTICELLI on the front cover. Botticelli’s Venus is perhaps one of the most famous nudes of the Renaissance. This connects this woman more closely to the idea of art. And for good measure, there is another drawing hanging in the doorway behind her. The woman’s dress and hair suggest a conservative style. I keep going back from the nude to the seated woman whose expression is severe. There is no smile, but rather a confident stare. This may be accentuated by the low position of Ansel’s camera. What year is this? Not being a very good judge of this style of clothing or for that matter the hair, I jump up to the thermostat on the wall. It’s boxy, maybe late 1950s. I look back at the hair and it reminds me of my grandmother when I was about ten, 1960. This is almost everything I can gather from this portrait.
On the right is the frame of a double bed. It’s metal and is Victorian in style, but severe with no headboard or footboard, only thin metal posters that remind me of the bars of jail in a western movie. I am moved in this direction because the bed is sitting outside in a parched depression of land composed of rock and sage on a stretch of desert that slopes at a distinct angle. Ansel has framed the photograph with a sliver of the sky to the left that provides a sense of the space. The bed rests plumb on a cut-out that may have been dug to support a house or a shack where this bed might have lived earlier. The bed takes up most of the frame. It dominates the landscape. The light is strong, shadows from the posters stretch forward toward the camera, and the backlight gives the bed frame a severe, blackened tonality. The metal is more than just a discarded bit of furniture. A couple shared this bed for rest and pleasure. But whatever happened on this bed happened a long time ago, the bed has been cast out. The rail on the left side is curved perhaps from the cumulative weight of the years of its service.
When I put these two photographs next to each other they begin to inform each other. The woman is old, the nude is young. The span of age is the better part of a lifetime. The woman rests quietly and looks directly at the camera. The nude young woman uses her arms to push her breasts forward toward the viewer but demurely turns her head away. The big hard metal in the dirt bursting the frame contains a lifetime of memories of getting up, making love, and lying down. I can’t help thinking about the fragility and temporality of it all. Once we were naked together and flaunted our sex. Before we know it, we’re on the far side and then gone. Every photograph contains a little death, for what was photographed in an instant is already past.
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On the right is the frame of a double bed. It’s metal and is Victorian in style, but severe with no headboard or footboard, only thin metal posters that remind me of the bars of jail in a western movie. I am moved in this direction because the bed is sitting outside in a parched depression of land composed of rock and sage on a stretch of desert that slopes at a distinct angle. Ansel has framed the photograph with a sliver of the sky to the left that provides a sense of the space. The bed rests plumb on a cut-out that may have been dug to support a house or a shack where this bed might have lived earlier. The bed takes up most of the frame. It dominates the landscape. The light is strong, shadows from the posters stretch forward toward the camera, and the backlight gives the bed frame a severe, blackened tonality. The metal is more than just a discarded bit of furniture. A couple shared this bed for rest and pleasure. But whatever happened on this bed happened a long time ago, the bed has been cast out. The rail on the left side is curved perhaps from the cumulative weight of the years of its service.
When I put these two photographs next to each other they begin to inform each other. The woman is old, the nude is young. The span of age is the better part of a lifetime. The woman rests quietly and looks directly at the camera. The nude young woman uses her arms to push her breasts forward toward the viewer but demurely turns her head away. The big hard metal in the dirt bursting the frame contains a lifetime of memories of getting up, making love, and lying down. I can’t help thinking about the fragility and temporality of it all. Once we were naked together and flaunted our sex. Before we know it, we’re on the far side and then gone. Every photograph contains a little death, for what was photographed in an instant is already past.
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