Larry Sultan & Mike Mandel: Evidence

In 1977, photographers Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel published a book that would radically transform both photography and the photobook canon. Sultan and Mandel sifted through thousands of photographs in the files of the Bechtel Corporation, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, the US Department of the Interior, Stanford Research Institute and a hundred other corporations, American government agencies and educational, medical and technical institutions. They were looking for photographs that were made and used as transparent documents and purely objective instruments‑as evidence, in short. Selecting 59 of the best, they published these images issuing them in 1977 in a simple, limited‑edition volume titled Evidence.

“Evidence” was reissued as a facsimile edition in 2004 by D.A.P. with a new spread of images and a group of black‑and‑white illustrations selected by the artists from an archive of photographs that were not included in the original book, plus a commissioned essay by Sandra Phillips.