The 1970s was an incredibly productive decade for Mandel. Before he turned 21 Mandel completed People in Cars and Myself: Timed Exposures among a number of conceptual photography projects, many of them self-published in book form that were later (2015) collected and re-published as a boxed edition of facsimile books and objects entitled Good 70s, edited by Mandel, Jason Fulford and Sharon Helgason Gallagher The publication led to a recognition of his 1970s projects in two concurrent solo exhibitions, one at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the other at Robert Mann Gallery in New York City, both in 2017. Good 70s included People in Cars (1970), Myself: Timed Exposures (1971), Mike's Motels and Motel Postcards (1974), Mrs. Kilpatric (1974), Seven Never Before Published Portraits of Edward Weston (1974), The Baseball Photographer Trading Cards (1975), and a set of letters ostensibly written by Sandra S. Phillips, Curator Emerita at SFMOMA, to Mandel during the 1970s, Letters from Sandra. The letters are real, but the dates fictional as they were written by Phillips specifically for the 2015 publication of the box set as a tongue in cheek contextualizing device describing her feelings about Mandel's works in progress while at the same time providing a running commentary on the Watergate scandal.
