Jim Mangan: The Crick

In the crumbling community of a fundamentalist Mormon sect, the boys who remained behind reinvent themselves as modern-day cowboys

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, n