ARTBOOK | DIGITALForthcoming for iPadLarry Sultan & Mike Mandel: Evidence eBookEssays by Sandra Philips and Robert Forth. |  | In 1977, photographers Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel sifted through thousands of photographs in the files of the Bechtel Corporation, the Beverly Hills Police Department, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, the U.S. 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 50 of the best, they printed these images with the care you would expect to find in a high-quality art photography book, publishing them in a simple, limited-edition volume titled Evidence. The concept for the book was clear: select photographs intended to be used as objective evidence and show that it is never that simple. Now an undisputed classic in the photo world, considered a seminal harbinger of conceptual photography, the first edition of Evidence is nearly impossible to find.
In recognition of the project's continued relevance D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers published a new edition in 2004, which also sold out quickly and is no longer available. Containing a facsimile copy of the original book plus a newly commissioned scholarly essay by Sandra Phillips of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the D.A.P. edition included 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. This is the eBook edition of the 2004 Evidence.
| FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/31/2014 In the 2004 second edition of Evidence, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel's seminal 1977 collection of found photography, Sandra Phillips wrote, "Today we are more accustomed to seeing pictures plucked from their original context and put on the wall of a museum of published as objects of artistic value, all without identifying or instructional text... At the time Evidence was [first] published, however, such a decontextualized presentation of photography, especially photographs made for the purpose of record, was a new phenomenon, and directed toward a still relatively tiny audience—those interested in photography as a kind of art. Yet the book proved to be a modest bombshell. It was elusive and poetic, it needed the viewer's active thought and engagement, it was not strictly speaking political, in those most political of times, and it was a challenge to those who thought they knew what art photographs looked like. Thanks to a renewed interest in conceptualism, and now a regard for photography's central role in contemporary art, this modest book today seems premonitory rather than dated or quaint. Its republication is a tribute to the continued resonance of these pictures." Now available as an eBook edition through iTunes. continue to blog |
|
 LARRY SULTAN & MIKE MANDEL: EVIDENCE
Essays by Sandra Philips and Robert Forth.
D.A.P./DISTRIBUTED ART PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 9781891024627 | US $50.00
Pub Date: 3/2/2004
Out of print | Not available
|
