Mandy Lee Jandrell’s long‑term photographic practice examines the visual language of constructed leisure environments—spaces such as theme and amusement parks, monuments, playgrounds and shopping malls. Her work critically engages with how these manufactured landscapes reflect, distort, and mediate cultural identity within an increasingly globalised world. These sites, often designed to entertain, reassure or transport visitors into idealised fantasies, become for Jandrell key spaces through which to interrogate the politics and economics that shape contemporary visual culture.

At the centre of this body of work is a sustained interest in how globalisation affects local cultures, aesthetic values and social aspirations. Leisure environments, with their carefully orchestrated architectures and scripted experiences, reveal the influence of market forces, tourism industries, and economic ambitions on the built landscape. Through her lens, Jandrell exposes how these spaces embody broader ideological frameworks—capitalist desire, national identity-making, and the commercialisation of cultural heritage.

A core tension driving the work is the question of truth in documentary photography. Jandrell draws on the conventions of documentary visual language—clarity, stillness, apparent neutrality—while deliberately photographing subjects that blur the boundary between authenticity and artifice. By presenting staged or fabricated environments through a documentary aesthetic, she interrogates the assumption that the camera’s perspective is inherently objective. Her photographs reveal how easily the language of “truth” can be co-opted to lend credibility to the unreal, the exaggerated, or the ideologically charged.

Humour often plays a subtle role in the images. Jandrell highlights the moments where the fake and the real converge, creating visual juxtapositions that are at once playful and unsettling. These slippages allow viewers to reconsider their own expectations about realism, representation, and photographic authority.

Much of this work was produced in China and South Africa during periods of rapid economic transformation and cultural repositioning in the early 2000s. Both countries were negotiating their presence within global capitalism, shaping new identities while grappling with the pressures and promises of modernisation. Against this backdrop, Jandrell’s images offer a nuanced reflection on how societies imagine themselves—and how these imaginings are constructed, performed, and consumed.

Through this series, Jandrell invites viewers to look beyond the surface spectacle of leisure environments and to question the systems of power, desire and imagination that underlie them. The work examines not only the spaces themselves, but also the stories they tell about authenticity, aspiration and the global circulation of fantasy.

The series Take Photo Here was originally produced for Jandrell’s MA Degree show at Goldsmiths College in 2003. The series were subsequently shown as a Solo Show at Joao Ferreira Gallery in Cape Town South Africa in 2004. Works from the series were shown in the East End Academy at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2004 (selected by Niru Ratnam, Chantal Crousel and Chris Ofili), The Royal Academy Summer show (2005) and The South African National Gallery (2009) and several group shows both in the UK and internationally. Works from the series are in the Government Art Collection (UK) and The South Africa National Gallery collection, as well as private collections.