Evidence

Evidence is one of the founding texts of postmodern photography: a book with no photographs taken by its authors, no captions, and no explanation. It is made almost entirely from images Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel found by combing the archives of over fifty American corporations, universities, and government bodies.

Sultan and Mandel spent two years, from 1975 to 1977, requesting access to photographic files at organizations including NASA, the Beverly Hills Police Department, Bechtel, and various aerospace and engineering firms. They pulled images originally made to document tests, procedures, or incidents. Stripped of their original captions and technical purpose, and resequenced without commentary, the pictures become opaque and faintly ominous: a man in a hazmat suit, a car half-buried at an angle, an object wrapped in plastic on a lab table. The effect forces the viewer to supply the missing context. It exposes how thoroughly meaning in documentary photography depends on caption and institution rather than the image itself. The artists self-published the book in 1977. D.A.P. reissued it in 2003 in this edition, with an introduction by SFMOMA photography curator Sandra S. Phillips and an afterword by Robert F. Forth.

Sultan (1946–2009) and Mandel (b. 1950) made Evidence as students at the San Francisco Art Institute. Both went on to individually influential careers, Sultan with Pictures from Home and The Valley, Mandel with conceptual and vernacular projects including Seven Days and People in Cars. Evidence remains their most widely cited collaboration and a touchstone for later appropriation-based photography.