About two years ago, I mentioned my first real encounter with the work of Mike Mandel. At that time, Mike sat in for a class that Bill Burke was teaching and talked about his career. One of the early projects that he discussed was his set of Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards (1975), a collection of portraits of photographers as baseball players with their “stats” on the back. These cards have since become collector’s items in the photography community but rarely do you see a complete set.

Well, as it turns out, Mike himself has put a complete collection on eBay.

Complete set of Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards, 1975 (auctioned on eBay)
© Mike Mandel

As he writes in the listing,

The Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards is a photo offset lithographic project that I authored and published in 1975. The project satirized the phenomenon of the fine art photography community being consumed by the larger art world and commercial culture. I photographed photographers as if they were baseball players and produced a set of cards that were packaged in random groups of ten, with bubble gum, so that the only way of collecting a complete set was to make a trade.

Recently, I have offered complete sets for sale, but they are rare. This is a first edition of all 134 Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards (plus one checklist, 135 cards in all). MINT CONDITION, offered for sale directly by the artist. Photographs by Mike Mandel. Texts, statistics and quotes by the respective artists printed on verso. Each card 3-1/2×2-1/2 inches. The reverse side for each card enabled the photographer to fill in their own personal data that referred to the information usually included on real baseball cards. In a sense, each photographer’s response provides an insight about how they approached their participation.

Some of the photographers, curators, and critics included are: Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Harry Callahan, Ed Ruscha, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Minor White, Robert Cumming, Lewis Baltz, Duane Michals, Edmund Teske, Peter Bunnell, Robert Heinecken, Beaumont Newhall, etc. The cards are stored in archival baseball card pages, no pvc, acid free, 9 cards to a page. The set is collected and sold within a storage binder, black, pure archival polyproylene.

I will sign my card upon request.

Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards: Mike Mandel, 1975 (auctioned on eBay)
© Mike Mandel

Have a few thousand to spend? Looking to do it in the next three hours? Then hurry up and place a bid!

[thanks Jason]

UPDATE: The auction sold for $4,049. The person who bought it is probably kicking themselves for not buying the same exact item here for $2,950 (a savings of $1099).

Popularity: 26% [?]

(from “Rabbit Hunting”)
© Colby Katz

Over on odpTV – accompanying a feature in the new issue of OjodePez, edited by Aaron Schuman – there’s a great NPR audio slideshow of Colby Katz’s Rabbit Hunting photographs (previously mentioned on the blog here).

Take a look!

Popularity: 26% [?]

First Tears Over Another Man, 2002
© Elinor Carucci

Women in Photography has just launched with their first online exhibition of photographs by women photographers: photographs by Elinor Carucci from her projects Crisis and Pain. Every other Tuesday of the month, WIP will present a new photographer, co-curated by my lovely friends Amy Elkins and Cara Phillips.

Visit the site to see more from Carucci. If you’re a woman photographer, you can also find the submission guidelines there.

Popularity: 36% [?]

Thanks to Leslie, I’ve been entertaining myself for the last fifteen minutes with this great little Java applet that can turn any website into a graph.

For a simple example, see my portfolio (shanelavalette.com):

Here’s an explanation of how it works from Sala, the creator:

Everyday, we look at dozens of websites. The structure of these websites is defined in HTML, the lingua franca for publishing information on the web. Your browser’s job is to render the HTML according to the specs (most of the time, at least). You can look at the code behind any website by selecting the “View source” tab somewhere in your browser’s menu.

HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph.

Sala has written an applet that visualizes such a graph. As you might expect, the visualization get more interesting when there are more tags. Here’s what this blog looks like (shanelavalette.com/journal):

Curious what the colors mean?

blue: links (the A tag)
red: tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: the DIV tag
violet: images (the IMG tag)
yellow: forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Here’s Google (google.com):

Looking at the graphs themselves is interesting – in fact, there’s a Flickr group dedicated solely to these sorts of images – but the applet also animates the graphs, allowing you to watch them grow from the HTML tag, the root node. Pretty neat.

Head to the site and try it for yourself!

Popularity: 37% [?]

Untitled, 1968 (from “RFK Funeral Train”)
© Paul Fusco

If you haven’t seen it, take a look at the New York Times’ slideshow, The Fallen, where Magnum photographer Paul Fusco talks about the photographs he made in 1968 aboard the train carrying Robert F. Kennedy’s coffin from New York City to Washington.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Charles Leadbeater, a researcher at the London think tank Demos, is raising a lot of interesting questions about sharing ideas and the role of the internet. (Along with the above video, also see his TED talk on collaborative innovation and the “rise of the amateur professional” and, if you have the time, read the first three chapters of his book, We Think.)

Lately I’ve been considering how this all affects photographers and bloggers and would love to host some conversation on the topic here.

Share your thoughts (because you can?)!

Popularity: 30% [?]

detail from Blown-Up Blow-Up (blownupblowup.com), 2008
© Constant Dullart

If you haven’t seen Antonioni’s 1966 classic Blow-Up (even more of a shame if you’re a photographer), you might not understand but should still take a look at Constant Dullaart’s latest web project Blown-Up Blow-Up (following, of course, Blown-Up Balloon and Blown-Up Explosion).

See more of Dullaart’s work here.

Popularity: 25% [?]

At the New York Photo Festival’s “Curating 2.0” panel, Tim Barber (photographer and curator behind the popular online photography gallery/archive known as Tiny Vices) mentioned that he was working on a series of books with photographers. That same week, I payed a visit to Michael Schmelling’s studio to check out his mock up for The Plan and Michael mentioned he had a book in the works for Tim.

Well, Tim just announced the launch of his new publishing house, TV Books, which includes Michael’s book, The Week of No Computer, as well as a selection of others. The current catalog features 12 titles and a gallery (featuring editioned prints and original works by TV Books’ artists), with many more books, posters and other projects on the way.

According to Tim, the following titles will be available soon:

Hope Against Reason by Brad Phillips
Don’t Look Down by Ben Shumacher
Everyday Demons by Vincent Dermody
Lookers by Eleonore Hendricks
Jesus Book by Peter Sutherland
Purpleviolet14 by Julia Burlingham
Hungry! Horny! Sleepy! by Jason Nocito

Take a look at the current catalog here. Keep up the great work, Tim! I’m looking forward to what’s to come.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Production still, on location of Untitled (Forest Clearing), 2006
© Cosi Theodoli-Braschi

Whether you’re a Crewdson-lover or a Crewdson-hater, it’s worth checking out Aperture’s behind the scenes exclusive. Read two interviews with him, see production stills on location, and learn about his process and some of the people involved in the making of an image.

Popularity: 40% [?]

Hartford, 1980 (from “A Storybook Life, 1976–1989”)
© Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Philip-Lorca diCorcia has always been one of my favorite photographers. I know I’ve mentioned his photographs on the blog a number of times but recently I came across a website that features a large amount of his work all in one place, including a selection of commercial/editorial/fashion work that he’s done for Adobe, Bottega Veneta, Fendi, and W Magazine.

It worth seeing; he has led quite an inspiring career in photography. Take a look!

Popularity: 42% [?]