On February 10, 2022, Doc Chat explored how one photographer used the time-honored genre of baseball cards to document his own artistic community. 

A weekly series from NYPL's Center for Research in the Humanities, Doc Chat pairs an NYPL curator or specialist and a scholar to discuss evocative digitized items from the Library's collections and brainstorm innovative ways of teaching with them. In Episode Forty-Three, NYPL's Zulay Chang and photography scholar Dr. Tal-Or Ben-Choreen explored Mike Mandel’s 1975 series Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards, a work composed of baseball cards originally sold in packages accompanied by a piece of bubblegum. Chang and Ben-Choreen discussed Mandel’s motivation for the series and the way the baseball cards provide insight into the networking that occurred between photographers, curators, and critics during the 1970s.

Unfortunately, this episode was not recorded, but you can review the episode transcript and the resources below. 

Episode Forty-Three: Primary Sources

Here are images of some of the Baseball-Photographer trading cards that Zulay and Tal-Or discussed:

You can locate item-level catalog records for Mandel’s Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards series using the Wallach Prints and Photographs catalog. Search “Mike Mandel” or “92PH027*” (the object number for all item records of Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards.). 

To make an appointment to see the series in person, contact the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs. 

Episode Forty-Three: Readings and Resources

Lewis Baltz, “American Photography in the 1970s: Too Old to Rock, Too Young to Die,” In American Images: Photography 1945-1980, edited by Peter Turner (Viking, 1985), 157-164.

Brad Balukjian, “That Time When Ansel Adams Posed for a Baseball Trading Card,” Smithsonian Sept 15, 2015. .     

Tal-Or Ben-Choreen, "The Institutionalization of Creative Photography’s Higher Education in the United States and Canada, c. 1960-1989." PhD thesis, Concordia University, 2021.

Juliet Hacking, “Photographic Exceptionalism,” Photographies 11.2-3 (2018): 353-66.

C. William Horrell, A Survey of Motion Picture, Still Photography, and Graphic Arts Instruction (Eastman Kodak Company, 1975). 

C. William Horrell, Photography Instruction in Higher Education: on Photographic Education in Colleges, Universities and Institutions in the United States (American Society of Magazine Photographers, 1964). 

Steven Lewis, James McQuaid, and David Tait, Photography Source & Resource (Turnip Press, 1973).

Donald Peter Lokuta, “Instruction in the History of Photography in Higher Education, The State of Art” Ph.D diss., Ohio University, 1975.

“Mike Mandel,” biography, Tate. 

“Mike Mandel: Good 70s,” exhibition, SFMOMA. 

Jessica S. McDonald, "Centralizing Rochester: A Critical Historiography of American Photography in the 1960s and 1970s." Ph.D diss., University of Rochester, 2014. 

Martha Rosler, “Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, and Makers: Thoughts on Audience.” Exposure 17.1 (September 1979): 10-25.

Aaron Schuman, “Mike Mandel: The Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards,” Aperture 200 (Fall 2010): 60-61. 

Stephanie Salter, “At the End of Your Ribbon Searching for Christmas Gifts? Here Are Good Ways to Spend From $4 to $4,000” Sports Illustrated Dec. 22,1975.. 

Nancy M. Stuart, “Photographic Higher Education in the United States,” in The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, edited by Michael R. Peres (Elsevier, Focal Press, 2007), 210-215.

Lindsey Westbrook, Of Art and Baseball: Mike Mandel’s Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards, SFMOMA, May 2017.

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