5 decades ago, Larry Sultan & Mike Mandel redefined photography

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?”

Lar­ry Sul­tan & Mike Man­del: Evi­dence is pub­lished by D.A.P.

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