In 2014, photographer Jim Mangan began a project documenting the vernacular architecture of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) community in and around Short Creek, on the Utah-Arizona border. First visiting just a few years after the imprisonment of the Church’s Prophet, Warren Jeffs, Mangan gradually became interested in a different story – that of a group of teenage boys who, unlike many in the community, hadn’t left Short Creek. Over the course of five years, Mangan documented these boys’ lives and the alternate reality they created for themselves, living much as they might have in the 19th century – breaking wild horses, riding through rugged landscapes of southern Utah and northern Arizona on horseback, and making their own buckskin clothing.
While The Crick depicts a community in the wake of social and religious collapse, it is also a story of the community that the young men who live there have forged for themselves. And in a larger sense, it is an examination of the deep relationship to the landscapes of the American West and the natural world that the boys have cultivated – one that is increasingly rare in the 21st century.
Mangan writes, “I think of The Crick as a call to unity during this era of polarization, an opportunity to experience the beauty, fallibility, and humanity of this idiosyncratic brotherhood. The subjects of these photographs inhabit a unique place in the desert expanses and open skies of the American West, suspended in a liminal space between hell and paradise. I hope that the images offer a bridge between our world and theirs.”
