Rose Mandel is closely associated with the well-established modernist tradition in Northern California photography as represented by Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, yet her nature studies and abstract landscapes also belong to the broader American landscape tradition exemplified by Minor White, Walter Chappell, Harry Callahan, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, and others who explored complex symbolic meanings in their images of the natural world.

Born in Poland, Mandel studied art in Paris, and child psychology with Jean Piaget in Switzerland.  She fled Europe in 1942, arriving in Staten Island, New York after a perilous journey in steerage on a steamer carrying hundreds of émigrés, including the celebrated French artist Marcel Duchamp.

Her country destroyed, family members and friends killed in the Holocaust, she made the San Francisco Bay Area her new home.  An introduction to Edward Weston inspired Mandel to study photography as an art form.  She began formal studies in 1946 with Ansel Adams at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in the very first class of the photography department Adams established.  Mandel felt that Adams had "saved her life" by showing her "a new way to see the world, through the lens of a camera."

During this period Mandel also developed a collaborative relationship with another instructor, Minor White, who was only two years her senior.  White shared Adams's reverence for the renowned photographer Alfred Stieglitz, stressing Stieglitz's theory of equivalents.  As the photography historian David Travis has observed, "Adams proved to be the mentor Mandel had hoped for in Weston"; however, "Mandel's nascent ideas about photography matched White's about psychology as student and teacher encouraged each other."  Mandel thus became an active participant in an exciting period in Bay Area art and photography that was largely centered around two significant educational institutions, the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and the University of California, Berkeley, where Mandel worked from 1947 to 1967 in the art department.