Rose Mandel

Rose Mandel (August 2, 1910 – March 12, 2002) was a Polish-born American photographer, who was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967.

Early life Rose Mandel was born in a Jewish family in Czaniec, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now Poland) in 1910. She studied child psychology with Jean Piaget in Geneva, at the Rousseau Institute. She lived in Paris in the 1930s. In 1942, during World War II, she and her husband Arthur left Europe for America. They arrived in Staten Island, New York on a steamer carrying hundreds of immigrants, including the celebrated French artist Marcel Duchamp. Her country destroyed, family members and friends killed in the Holocaust, she made the San Francisco Bay Area her new home. An introduction to Edward Weston inspired Mandel to study photography as an art form. She studied photography at the California School of Fine Arts, with Ansel Adams and Minor White as instructors. One of her classmates, who became a close friend, was Richard Diebenkorn.

Career Mandel was interested in exploring the many avenues of the photographic process. From the late 1940s through the early 1970s, she created original portraits, close-ups of nature, abstractions of water and street photographs. Rose Mandel roamed the streets of San Francisco with her “cumbersome 4-by-5-inch view camera and tripod, capturing store fronts, doorways, advertisements, and graffiti, the kind of things people pass everyday but rarely notice amid the urban clutter”. These black and white photographs she captured displayed “sanctuaries charged with human hopes and longings...touching on all the intangible havens of the human spirit stored in half-forgotten memories”. Her 1948 show, "On Walls and Behind Glass", at the San Francisco Museum of Art, focused on street photography. It comprised Mandel's twenty contact prints, incorporating reflections and graffiti in San Francisco.

In 1954, she had a solo exhibit at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, titled "The Errand of the Eye," after an Emily Dickinson poem. The photographs in this show were mostly nature subjects in closeup. This sequence of 49 photographs dating from 1951 to 1954 consisted of contact prints of delicate flowers, weeds, branches, twigs, and thorns, in which an area of the picture was in sharp focus while the rest was selectively blurred. Following the 1954 exhibition The Errand of the Eye, landscapes made in and around the shoreline of the Berkeley Marina and San Francisco Bay became Mandel's primary focus. In 1956, photographs by Rose Mandel accompanied an ARTnews profile of Richard Diebenkorn. "I never tried to imitate painting," Mandel explained late in life. "I wanted to be very photographic, 100 percent photographic." From the mid-1960s through about 1972, Mandel moved away from the intimate contact-print format, which she described as being time capsules of her innermost feelings. Mandel's last photographs were made between 1970 and 1972.

Personal life Rose Mandel died in Berkeley, California, in 2002, aged 91 years. In 2013, a retrospective titled "The Errand of the Eye: Photographs by Rose Mandel," featuring 80 of her works, was organized by the de Young Museum in San Francisco, California.