The Crick by Jim Mangan (Twin Palms, 2023)

A dark green synthetic leather cover, embossed with the profile of a young man in cowboy hat and bolo tie, opens into Jim Mangan’s rich and unsettling document of American boyhood on the rural edge of Utah. The Crick is a photographic study of a community in limbo — descendants of polygamist pioneers, living off-grid near the Utah-Arizona border — suspended somewhere between frontier myth, poverty, and latent rebellion.

Shot over four years, Mangan’s portraits of boys in camo, Stetsons, denim, or near-nude in riverbanks, trucks, and empty interiors recall the intimate tension of early Larry Clark and the formal gaze of Rineke Dijkstra, but speak in their own haunted, distinctly Western vernacular. There is almost no adult presence. Instead, the book holds a charged silence — boys play with guns, wrestle in dirt, or sit in rooms with floral wallpaper, blank-eyed and unclaimed.

The production echoes the strange Americana within: gold-gilded edges, thick uncoated paper, and the devotional format of a family Bible. Designed and printed with the moral weight of archival memory, The Crick resists judgment but doesn’t look away. Like its protagonists, it seems caught between adolescence and aftermath.

This belongs in Darwin for the way it refracts a hyperlocal world through an unflinching lens — as tender as it is unsparing, and as much about myth as documentary.

Technical Sheet
Title: The Crick
Artist / Author: Jim Mangan
Date: 2023
Technique / Printing Method: Offset, tri-tone and four-color plates
Medium / Materials: Synthetic leather-wrapped hardcover with embossed cover and gilded edges
Dimensions (cm): 25.4 × 33
Language: English
Pages: 124
Publisher / Editor: Twin Palms Publishers
ISBN: 978-1-936611-22-5
Condition: NEW