Mandy Lee Jandrell: 'Take Photo Here'
by Sue Williamson
It is difficult to approach any major tourist attraction in the world without having to weave a crooked path for fear of spoiling the pictures of all the tourists photographing their friends in front of said attraction. Few holidays are complete without the dash to the photo lab on return and the subsequent admiring interest of the folks at home.
In 'Take Photo Here' photographer Mandy Lee Jandrell stands back to photograph those being photographed by another out-of-frame photographer. The results are often humorous, and tell us much about the increasingly homogenous state of global tourism, with its theme parks that reproduce chunks of one part the world and plonk them down somewhere else. A Japanese woman leaning against a rail with the brow, trunk and tusks of a stone elephant leaning into the picture at right is surely somewhere in Asia - but no,the location is the Bridge of Time in Sun City, South Africa, the same venue as the exotic looking Monkey Spring Plaza. In Valley of the Waves, a merry group of bronzed swimsuit clad holidaymakers pose on the sand in a setting that although it looks at first glance as if it must be on a Pacific island somewhere, has rocks which look as if they have been cast by set builders. To capture moments like these, the photographer has to work fast.
In entitling her exhibition 'Take Photo Here', Jandrell has struck on a theme which could be developed much further with many nuances, and it was a little disappointing that in the not overly large gallery, several photos were included that while they had their own merits, like the Michael Jackson poster on a building behind a demolition site, and the bees drowning in drinking glasses, were out of synch with the rest. Nonetheless, the work is fresh and intriguing, and I look forward to seeing more work from this promising young photographer, who was recently awarded her Masters degree from Goldsmiths College in London.
