John Mandeen’s photography

Born in Minnesota, John grew up on the beautiful California coast in Pacific Grove near Monterey. On September 19, 1968 at age 24, he came to India with a one-way ticket from Los Angeles to Kolkata and within a month, through a series of almost “orchestrated” events, ended up in Pondicherry at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, where Mother accepted him as an Ashramite. 

John helped set up the first silk-screen print workshop in the Ashram Press, where he designed and printed book covers, greeting cards, letterheads, visiting cards and posters. He had no formal training in art but enjoyed making intricate and complex line drawings with ink. He took up photography in the late 1970s and got seriously into it in the 1980s, among other things extensively documenting Auroville in all its aspects. From 1988 he was part of the Prisma team which did all the publicity work for Aurelec, and many of the Prisma publications include his photos.

In 1994 he took photos for the first Auroville exhibition at the Visitors Centre. He also taught photography to many Auroville children, some of whom ended up becoming photographers themselves. Recently he had been working with the Ashram Archives on a new book they are bringing out.

As a photographer, John was a perfectionist and a classicist. Like the great classical photographers, John did his own processing and printing, and his work was dominated by superb lighting (he only worked with natural light), fidelity, exposure and great compositions.

A selection of his work can be viewed at mandeen.in