Evidence

In 1977, photographers Larry Sultan (1946-2009) and Mike Mandel (b. 1950) published a book that would radically transform both photography and the photobook canon – a book described by Martin Parr, in The Photobook: A History, as ‘one of the finest, densest and most baffling photobooks in existence, a never-ending box of visual mischief.’’

Sultan and Mandel sifted through thousands of photographs contained in the files of the Bechtel Corporation, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, the US Department of the Interior, the Stanford Research Institute and a hundred other companies, US government agencies and educational, medical and technical institutions. They were looking for photographs made and used as transparent documents and purely objective instruments – evidence, in short.

They selected 59 of the best images and published them with the care one would expect from a book of high-quality art photography, publishing them in 1977 in a single, limited-edition volume entitled Evidence.

Long established as a photobook classic and a seminal example of conceptual photography, 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. Today both this reissue and the original 1977 publication are exceptionally rare and command high prices.

D.A.P. now reprints the 2004 edition of Evidence, making available to a general readership a truly pioneering and canonical photobook.”