Making Good Time
Santa Cruz: California Museum of Photography, 1989. 1st Edition. Quarto, publisher's illustrated glossy paper covered boards, pictorially illustrated gray endpapers.
First edition of American photographer Mike Mandel’s artists book resurrecting the photographic efficiency studies of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, the “scientific management” pioneers best known to the public as the parents fictionalized in Cheaper by the Dozen (1950). The Gilbreths pioneered the use of photography as an industrial tool, rigging workers, typists, surgeons, and soldiers with small lights to produce “chronocyclegraphs,” time-exposed tangles of light meant to create empirical evidence of the most efficient way to perform a task. For this project, Mandel selected images from the Gilbreth’s archive and extended their work with his own absurdist light-movement studies. Illustrated with black-and-white and color plates, includes a preface by Edward W. Earle, and Mandel’s introduction illustrated with black-and-white reproductions of archival research. No dust jacket as issued. Light wear to boards, near fine. Item #13118
$40.00