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Mike Mandel Author

Mike Mandel (b. 1950) moved from Los Angeles to the Bay Area in 1973 to study photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. During this time he met fellow artist Larry Sultan, with whom he collaborated on Evidence (1975–77), a sequence of found photographs from government and corporate archives that has been recognized as one of the most important photographic books of the 20th century. From 1973 to 1990 Mandel and Sultan also developed a series of enigmatic public billboards that rupture the conventions of advertising culture.

Mandel's most recent personal projects have been in collaboration with his wife, Chantal Zakari. Their book, The State of Ata, (2010) speaks to the clash between Islam and secularism in Turkey. They Came to Baghdad, (2012) is a response to the Iraq War, and Lockdown Archive (2015) is a record of all the images uploaded to the web that relate to the military occupation of Watertown after the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013. He currently lives in Watertown, Massachusetts, and teaches at Tufts University, in greater Boston.