5 decades ago, Larry Sultan & Mike Mandel redefined photography

Evidence — Between 1975 and 1977, the two photographers sifted through thousands of images held by official institutions, condensing them into a game-changing sequence.

If brevity is the soul of wit, ambiguity is the essence of mystery: the familiar suddenly foreign, unmooring, and riddled with intrigue. You think you know, until you are shown. This is where Larry Sultan & Mike Mandel: Evidence (D.A.P.) begins.

First published in 1977, Evidence upended the pretence of high and low art, just as photography had finally begun to achieve recognition from the long exclusionary art world.

The book brings together 59 uncaptioned photographs drawn from some two million images held in the archives of 77 government agencies, corporations, and education institutions. They ranged from the Beverly Hills Police Department to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power – the corrupt organisation at the heart of the 1974 blockbuster film, Chinatown.

Half a century later, Evidence has become canon without losing any of its charge. The questions it poses of photography’s role as a tool of propaganda to uphold systems of power feels all too timely in our brave new world.

Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, native Los Angelenos who first met as graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1973, had built a collaborative practice that combined the subversive spirit of the Pictures Generation with DIY spirit of punk, casually upending entrenched hierarchies of Western cultural hegemony.

“Larry and I weren’t part of the San Francisco tradition that includes the Beat generation, and that’s one of the reasons we found each other,” says Mandel. “We were of an enlightened cynicism standpoint, instead of the romantic appreciation of history.” They were drawn to a new wave of photobooks like American Snapshot, Champion Pig, and Wisconsin Death Trip that centred personal and community photographic histories. Mandel and Sultan wanted to participate and recognised the moment they were in: the emergence of a West Coast citadel of neoliberalism.

“There were all these organisations looking to build the future through applied technology located in California: Lockheed Aircraft, Northrop Aircraft, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Stanford Research Institute. We saw ourselves within the context of how photography was developing,” says Mandel.

“When I was a kid in LA, I remember going to the Monsanto House of the Future Disneyland; it was about technologies giving us all these great opportunities for a utopian life,” he continues. “Only later, when we were draft age, we realised Monsanto was the company that made Agent Orange, the herbicide that created an incredible amount of cancer for American soldiers and Vietnamese people during the war.”

Much in the same way, the photographs featured in Evidence explore the ways in which aesthetics can be used to shape political ideology when context is obliterated.

“We had it in mind that perhaps we could find images that might be seen as a counterpoint to the story that they were telling, and it would be told through their own photographs, which was more a dystopia than a utopia,” says Mandel.

Ultimately, Evidence is a meditation on our compulsion to believe everything we see, even taking the title at face value despite the fact there are no captions in the book. “There’s no real case being made here,” says Mandel. “It’s an opportunity to work with the photographs poetically and ask, what’s going on here?”