You don’t pay taxes on unfinished homes. That may not be the only reason so many houses in the community of Colorado City-Hildale went unfinished, but it is what first drew Jim Mangan to the place. Known for his work across the American West—particularly in Utah and Colorado, where he has spent decades photographing landscapes shaped by water scarcity and human intervention—Mangan was initially attracted to the town on the Utah/Arizona border by these large, unsettled structures rising out of a harsh desert environment. But you’ll see almost none of that in The Crick, the artist’s exhibition at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art in Logan.

Mangan spent five years returning to the community known locally as The Crick. What began as an interest in architecture gave way to something more interior, as his attention settled on the lives unfolding inside and around those structures—particularly the teenage boys and young men coming of age in the wake of the 2011 arrest of Warren Jeffs.

Short Creek, or “The Crick,” was established in the early 20th century by fundamentalist Mormons committed to plural marriage. In 1953, Arizona authorities attempted to dismantle the community, removing children and arresting dozens of men—but the raid generated so much public sympathy for the families torn apart that it became a cautionary tale about government overreach, and the community was largely left to govern itself for the next half-century. It took the crimes of Warren Jeffs to force another intervention.

In the early 2000s, media attention focused on the “lost boys”—a generation of young men pushed out of the community during Jeffs’ rule. The subjects in Mangan’s photographs are their younger brothers and cousins, the ones who were still children when things began to unravel and who, for various reasons, have remained. They have inherited something partial, left to shape lives within structures that no longer fully hold.

A series of four color portraits introduces the exhibition. These are boys on the threshold of manhood, caught in moments of quiet self-possession or guardedness. In one, a young man looks back from a dim interior, his expression unreadable, the light flattening his features. In another, a shirtless figure stands in the desert, a cast bright against his skin, his body both exposed and temporarily mended.

Elsewhere, the images move into the spaces the boys inhabit. A cramped bedroom lined with bunk beds holds a cluster of young men in various states of rest and wakefulness, their bodies arranged without ceremony. Coins and playing cards are scattered across a tabletop, along with a copy of the Book of Mormon and an issue of High Country News. The interiors feel provisional—lived in, but not settled.

The subjects seem more at ease outdoors, in the landscape that surrounds them. In several images, figures move through open terrain—riding horses, climbing dunes, sliding down steep sandy slopes. There is a sense joy and danger in a landscape electrified by a particular kind of male theater—bodies angled toward an audience of peers. But some of Mangan’s most telling images are made from a distance: a lone rider trudging through deep snow, another working a trick in the desert with no one watching.

Mangan doesn’t push these moments toward explanation. He lets them sit and the photographs build slowly until a wideer picture emerges—not of a place but of a particular moment in time. Not an examination of the architecture of buildings, but the architecture of lives—structures inherited, abandoned, or still waiting to be completed.

Jim Mangan: The Crick, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, through July 25.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.