The Boys of the Crick: A Conversation with Photographer Jim Mangan and authors Judith Freeman and Roman Bateman

Director of the Desert Humanities Initiative and Professor of Religious Studies, Jason Bruner, will host a conversation with photographer, Jim Mangan and authors Judith Freeman and Roman Bateman on the critically-acclaimed book, The Crick.

This event is made possible through the Max Millett Family, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Desert Humanities Initiative and the Humanities Institute. 

About 'The Crick'

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 (FLDS) houses in the Utah-Arizona border town of Short Creek. 

He soon found that the bigger 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, who remained with their families in Short Creek as others elected to leave the town altogether. 

'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 reader into an alternate reality of the boys’ making: where they explore the rugged terrain of southern Utah, northern Arizona and southern Nevada on horseback, emulating old-time explorers of the Western frontier. His “ecological and sociological approach” to this series, spanning five years, depicts the playfulness of youth against the capricious landscape of the American West. In both their real and imaginary worlds, these subjects have gained a knowledge of and closeness to nature that has largely been lost in the conventions of modern life. 

The collection of photographs is accompanied by an essay by author Judith Freeman and a text by apostatized former FLDS member and artist Roman Bateman.

Jim Mangan is an American photographer and filmmaker. He has been named a Light Work Artist-in-Residence and a Gold Lead Award Winner through the Lead Academy in Hamburg Germany. His work is in the permanent collections of Light Work in Syracuse, MoMA Catalogue in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Artist Book Collection, and the New York Public Library. Mangan’s work has been exhibited at The Little House in Los Angeles; Deichtorhallen in Hamburg; Kunst im Tunnel in Düsseldorf; Everson Art Museum in Syracuse; the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Sundance Film Festival. Mangan's work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine, SLEEK, Vice, The California Sunday, Vogue, National Geographic, Time and Harper's Magazine.

Judith Freeman is the author of five novels, a collection of short stories, a memoir, and a biography of Raymond Chandler, The Long Embrace, named as one of the top ten best books of 2007 by Newsweek. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, as well as other awards, and lives in Idaho and Los Angeles with her husband, artist-photographer Anthony Hernandez. 

Roman Bateman is an apostate of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). He is both a subject and writer in the book, 'The Crick.' He lives between worlds near Short Creek, AZ.