EVIDENCE

EVIDENCE


CREDITS

GUP Author

SANDRA PHILIPS AND ROBERT FORTH


In 1977, photographers Larry Sultan (USA) and Mike Mandel (USA) published a book entitled ‘Evidence’. Accompanied by an exhibition in the same year at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, this project was the culmination of a three-year search through the files and archives of over 100 American government agencies, educational institutions and corporations.
Mandel and Sultan assembled a careful sequence of 59 pictures from approximately two million documents and objective records depicting activities and situations: crime scenes, aeronautical engineering tests and industrial experiments, among other subjects. The photographs were reproduced without explanatory captions and have been stripped of their institutional contexts. ‘Evidence’ is a clever composition of pictures that once served a functional purpose but carefully sequenced, and presented as expressive artefacts, testify to cryptic and dubious industrial rituals. The books sequential narrative requires active participation in creating its meaning. In this way, Mandel and Sultan constructed a realm of mysterious events and unfathomable activities, which they claimed functioned as a poetic exploration upon the restructuring of imagery’.

Photographs by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel
Text by Sandra Phillips and Robert Forth
D.A.P., New York, 2003
108 pages
25 black & white and 61 duotone illustrations
255 × 235 mm
Collectable first edition avaible from $350 / €265

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