The Crick - First edition

November 2023
10 × 13 inches
124 pages
55 tri-tone plates
13 four-color plates
Synthetic leather–wrapped hardcover with embossed detail

Text by Judith Freeman. Prose by Roman Bateman.

“Such is the power of the land depicted in these photographs, with the lightning-struck pines and truncated stumps and the rivers running red, where the whorls of rock and the whorls of stone and water and trees cast a furious, surging beauty. That is what Jim Mangan has captured in these pictures of both the changing boys and their changing world.”
— Judith Freeman

American photographer Jim Mangan began The Crick as a photographic survey of the unorthodox architecture of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints houses in the Utah–Arizona border town of Short Creek.

He soon found that the larger story lay in a group of teenage boys navigating their disintegrating community, fractured after leader Warren Jeffs was imprisoned in 2011. These subjects were children at the time of the fallout and remained with their families in Short Creek as others chose to leave the town.

The Crick is a meditation on religious succession, patriarchal systems, zealotry and fraternity in the life built by these young men. Mangan’s pictures transport the viewer into an alternate reality shaped by the boys themselves, where they explore the rugged terrain of southern Utah, northern Arizona and southern Nevada on horseback, echoing the explorers of the Western frontier.

His ecological and sociological approach to this series, spanning five years, depicts the playfulness of youth against the unpredictable landscape of the American West. In both their real and imagined worlds, these subjects have developed a knowledge of and closeness to nature that has largely been lost in the conventions of modern life.