Selected from an online submission pool of over 500 images, Lay Flat’s unconfined photos come from a disparate group of photographers spanning the globe, representing a wide range in style, subject, and theme. Each image is beautiful separately, but placed together, the feeling is one of sustained bliss. The importance of context is implied by the variety of images, and it’s also a major theme in the writing that accompanies Lay Flat. In an interview with Mike Mandel, Lavalette asks about the origins of Mandel’s groundbreaking exploration of found photography, Evidence, a collection of re-contextualized industrial and archival photographs he published with the legendary Larry Sultan in 1977.

We learned pretty quickly that if we were going to use a police photograph, it would have to be something that was a little more ambiguous and more questioning. The engineering photographs were easier because we were looking at these hi-tech projects, so for the most part we didn’t really know what we were looking at anyway. […] But they were evocative, just by the way that the photograph was made. Just by the quality of the photograph, the perspective, the composition or what was there. There were all kinds of possible poetic interpretations if you looked at the picture out of context.

Mandel’s approach to found photography has had a direct impact on the way we view images today— from Tumblr to FFFFOUND, looking at images out of context is almost embedded in the Internet’s DNA. It’s altered even the way we take pictures, and that much is evidenced in Lay Flat’s collection of photographs. None of them are entirely transparent in their meanings— each image begs the viewer to use their imagination, and come up with their own interpretation.

Lay Flat is a post-magazine publication. Amidst the technology-adled death throes of the publishing industry, an undergraduate blogger has created a physical object that captures the essence of the Internet, provides thoughtful discourse that isn’t indulgent or elitist, and showcases great photography rather than work that has been already been accepted within the “art-commercial complex,” as Mandel calls it.