The Architecture of Space

S. BILLIE MANDLE

In Her Own Words

©S. Billie Mandle

Series: San Mateo
Title: San Mateo 3, 2010
Size: 32"x40"
Medium: C-Type
Edition:  6

Price: $1,800

"My work explores photography as both an attentive study of reality and a way of pointing beyond it. Beginning with the premise that the world withholds as much as it reveals, I look at the intersection of people, their environments and beliefs, focusing on the places where lives and ideologies coalesce.

In this series, San Mateo, I photograph parking garages in my hometown, digitally removing the parking lines and signs to create abstract spaces. Garages organize parked vehicles, creating orderly, purposeful environments; to function, they assume that people obey rules and follow directions. My father is a civil engineer who designs parking garages; by removing the parking lines I undo my father’s work, creating purposeless structures. 

I am interested in the way the spaces, without function, become unfamiliar and chaotic. With these images I investigate the relationship between environment and perception, the material and the ethereal, art and engineering.  For me, photography offers the challenge of trying to convey the complexity of reality by describing the surface of the world."