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photographer jim mangan visits usuphoto
Apr. 14, 2024
Jim Mangan, from The Crick.
USUPhoto will host photographer/filmmaker Jim Mangan for a conversation April 15. Mangan will discuss his recent book, The Crick, which tenderly and poetically documents a group of young men living on the fringes of the FLDS community along the Utah-Arizona border. The conversation is scheduled for 12:30-1:30 in Professor Jared Ragland’s Advanced Photography Studio class, FAV 113. The visit is supported though a Bear Lake Needs Assessment Grant. All are welcome to attend, however space is limited.
About The Crick:
Mangan began The Crick as a photographic survey of the unorthodox architecture of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) houses in the Utah-Arizona border town of Short Creek. He soon found that the bigger story lay in a group of teenage boys navigating their disintegrating community, fractured after leader Warren Jeffs was imprisoned in 2011. These subjects were children at the time of the fallout, who remained with their families in Short Creek as others elected to leave the town altogether.
The Crick is a meditation on religious succession, patriarchal systems, zealotry and fraternity in the life built by these young men. Mangan’s pictures transport the reader into an alternate reality of the boys’ making: where they explore the rugged terrain of southern Utah, northern Arizona and southern Nevada on horseback, emulating old-time explorers of the Western frontier. His “ecological and sociological approach” to this series, spanning five years, depicts the playfulness of youth against the capricious landscape of the American West. In both their real and imaginary worlds, these subjects have gained a knowledge of and closeness to nature that has largely been lost in the conventions of modern life.
The Crick is part of the USU Photobook Special Collection and published by Twin Palms, who has graciously supported the collection and is represented by nearly two dozen titles.