RARE, NEW - Evidence, by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, 1977, facsimile & expanded, later D.A.P. re-issue - new order in original shrink-wrap

Hardcover, new condition in original shrink wrap, approx 10 by 9 1/4 inches, published by D.A.P. (ISBN 9781942884149, ISBN 1942884141)

Any serious photographer or photography student should have this important book (see reviews from Artforum and New York TImes below).

see a book flip of an unwrapped book at this video link: https://vimeo.com/210598660

In 1977, photographers Larry Sultan (1946-2009) and Mike Mandel (born 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 most beautiful, dense and puzzling photobooks in existence, an endless visual box of tricks." 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 with the care you would expect to find in a high-quality art photography book, issuing them in 1977 in a simple, limited-edition volume titled Evidence. (ISBN 9780918290014, ISBN 0918290015)

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. (ISBN 9781891024627, ISBN 1891024620) 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 2004 reissue and the original 1977 publication are exceptionally rare.

D.A.P. reprinted the 2004 edition of Evidence (ISBN 9781942884149, ISBN 1942884141) in 2017, and this edition quickly sold out and is out of print. This is the book for sale her.

Buyer Beware - condition is a big deal with used books and this book for sale here is in the condition as pictured and described - best to ask other sellers that do not post pictures with their listing, or use a "Stock Photo," or use generic condition descriptions, to provide photos of the actual book before you make a purchase.

ARTFORUM

SAN FRANCISCO
Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel
WIRTZ ART
5863 Chabot Road
March 6–April 12, 2014

Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel grew up a few miles from each other in the San Fernando Valley, just east of Los Angeles, but didn't meet until 1973 when both men were graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute. Sensing a shared interest in vernacular imagery and social practice (Sultan had briefly been a social worker; Mandel had aspirations to be a lawyer), the young artists began collaborating and would go on to create twenty-five projects together over the next twenty-seven years.

For Evidence, 1977, the duo culled fifty-nine black-and-white photographs, twenty-seven of which are in this show, from two million images from over eighty government agencies. Without captions or explanations, the artists have exhibited and published the found photographs. They depict, among other things, an anonymous man hooked up to wires, a rope being held out like a noose by a gloved hand, and construction workers wading through a sea of foam. The sum on display is elusive. By divorcing content from context, Sultan and Mandel's clever and profound work consistently refuses conclusion and enables the promise of uncertainty.

Through a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Sultan and Mandel were given access to archival photos from the repositories of major government agencies. Separated from their original context, these photographs depict technological and industrial procedures and experiments without any explanation of background or history.

New York Times
PHOTOGRAPHY VIEW
Glene Thornton
Dec. 25, 1977

The most scandalous show of the year was “Evidence,” organized by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It did not travel, and hence was not seen in the East, but the little book based on the show has the New York photographic avant‐garde gnashing its teeth in envy and chagrin. The photographs in it are of the currently fashionable type whose subject matter is hopelessly obscure though the form is quintessentially photographic. However, they were not taken by avant‐garde art photographers but found in the files of government agencies, educational institutions and corporations, where they originally served drab, utilitarian purposes.

Larry Sultan, California Photographer, Dies at 63
By Randy Kennedy
Dec. 14, 2009

Larry Sultan, a highly influential California photographer whose 1977 collaboration, “Evidence” — a book made up solely of pictures culled from vast industrial and government archives — became a watershed in the history of art photography, died on Sunday at his home in Greenbrae, Calif. He was 63.

The cause was cancer, said his wife, Katherine, who is known as Kelly.

In the mid 1970s using a grant and a letter of introduction from the National Endowment for the Arts, Mr. Sultan and Mike Mandel, who had met as students at the San Francisco Art Institute, somehow managed to persuade several large companies, agencies and research institutions like the Bechtel Corporation, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the San Jose Police Department and the United States Department of the Interior to let them rummage through their documentary photo files.

Highly influenced by the West Coast brand of Conceptualism then percolating out of places like the California Institute of the Arts, both men were interested, as Mr. Mandel later said, in exploring photography as “more than just the modernist practice of fine-tuning your style and way of seeing.” The pictures they chose from the archives, out of the hundreds of thousands they examined, were a strange, stark, sometimes disturbing vision of a late-industrial world: a space-suited figure sprawled face down on a carpeted floor; a car consumed in flames; a man holding up a tangle of weeds like a trophy; a shaved monkey being held down by a gloved hand.

Some of the images seemed to have been picked for their uncanny resemblance to installation art being made at the time. But the 59 photos published, with no captions to explain what they showed or where they came from, pursued a much broader, Duchampian agenda of harnessing found photographs for the purposes of art while using them as a way to examine the society that produced them. The critic Kenneth Baker of The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that the project demonstrated brilliantly the degree to which “we have no calculus to unravel relations between what a picture shows and what it explains.”

Along with other artwork using vernacular photographs, like that of Michael Lesy in his book “Wisconsin Death Trip” and of Richard Prince, the project, first shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, opened broad new avenues for photography that have since been explored by major museums and by artists like Christian Boltanski and Carrie Mae Weems.

Born in Brooklyn, Mr. Sultan was raised mostly in Los Angeles, where his family moved when he was an infant and where his father worked as a traveling salesman and later as a vice president for the Schick Safety Razor Company.

Not initially interested in photography, Mr. Sultan studied political science at the University of California at Santa Barbara and later earned a master's degree in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. Before he and Mr. Mandel began working on “Evidence,” they collaborated on another project in which they bought space on billboards around Los Angeles and posted traffic-slowing Dada-esque messages. One bore the announcement “Oranges on Fire,” and showed two cartoonish arms holding a bunch of flaming oranges.

For more than a decade beginning in the early 1980s, Mr. Sultan, who became a professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, worked on a project about his mother and his father, who had been forced into early retirement. Using stills from home movies along with lush, colored-saturated pictures he took of his parents, the resulting book order, “Pictures From Home,” was a deeply personal document but one that continued Mr. Sultan's lifelong mission of exploring photography's fictions.

Mr. Sultan's father, Irving, speaking of a picture of himself in a suit sitting on the edge of a bed with a vacant stare on his face, related how his son had instructed him not to smile and had created a portrait that the elder Mr. Sultan felt was much more about the photographer than the photographed.

“ ‘Any time you show that picture,' ” Mr. Sultan said his father told him, “‘you tell people that that's not me sitting on the bed looking all dressed up and nowhere to go, depressed. That's you sitting on the bed, and I am happy to help you with the project, but let's get things straight here.' ” His parents died not long after the work was completed.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Sultan is survived by two sons, Max and Will, both of Greenbrae; and two brothers, Michael, of Pacific Palisades, Calif., and Kenneth, of Santa Barbara.

In the 1990s, Mr. Sultan began to photograph in the San Fernando Valley, near when he went to high school, shooting suburban homes that were being rented as sets for pornographic movies. Sandra S. Phillips, the photography curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, said that while the work, called “The Valley,” was “nominally about the industry of adult sexual fantasy, the true subject of Sultan's pictures is how photography is used in the construction of that fantasy.”

Writing in LA Weekly about the work in 2004, Mr. Sultan observed of one particular set: “The furnishings and objects in the house, which have been carefully arranged, become estranged from their intended function. The roll of paper towels on the coffee table, the bed linens in a pile by the door, the shoes under the bed are transformed into props or the residue of unseen but very imaginable actions. Even the piece of half-eaten pie on the kitchen counter arouses suspicion.”