I'm Mike Mandel and I work together with Larry Sultan for
almost 25 years but, I think the work that were most known for
is a project that we did back in 1977 which is called Evidence.
And Evidence is a way that Larry and I came to understand that we could look at,
extend photographs in primarily industrial archives.
And that we have an opportunity there to take them out of that context and
represent them so they might have a very different kind of message than
they were originally intended to make.
There were about 80 different places that we went to visit that were either
corporations or government agencies that had archives of photographs that they were
making for their own purposes to document their various engineering projects.
Over a two-year period we looked at over 2 million photographs, and
we would just make notes of pictures that we thought could be taken out
of context and turned into a narrative that might speak about this idea
of our faith in progress, and solving all of our problems.
We recognized that we wanted to look at photographs that people
probably wouldn't normally have access to.
And it was kind of interesting at the beginning because we didn't really know
what to look for.
It's hard to find pictures that have this kind of poetic sense about them
until you look for them and you look at everything.
The first photograph is of footprints that police have dusted in the sidewalk.
And then you see that the footprints go deeper into perspective.
But the footprints have changed, the left foot's on the right,
the right foot's on the left.
Now that's a way for us, at least, to start the piece,
saying what you see is going to be going awry.
Things are a little wrong here and it kind of moves from
individual objectifications of things to the landscape, and there's all these
odd things that are happening in the landscape which you can understand.
There's trees that are in a big box that are being tended to by people.
There is hospital beds that are sitting outside on the grass.
There's a picture of a flash going off in a reflection of a window
with a man in a controlled panel and it looks like he's just set off for
atomic bomb, although obviously it's just a flash in the window.
After seeing all these other photographs, you start to work with and
hopefully play with the photographic language that we've employed here.
The book itself is the artwork, so you look at this blue hardbound book, and
it has some words Evidence on the front.
It looks like it's kind of a library binding, and it's made so
that you would think that it is some kind of evidentiary document,
maybe produced by the Berkeley Law School, or [LAUGH] something.
And then when you look at the book there were no captions,
there was no reference to which picture came from what agency.
We were relying simply on the power of the photograph to communicate something on
a psychological level.
Then we were very much of the understanding of how a picture has a power
to work in relationship to each other so, a facing page would be really important
way to think about how one picture relates to each other,
how would one picture can influence another.
Everything is a two page spread, two images that are bouncing
off each other and making you have a response from that dynamic.
There's this kind of utopian idea that we are looking at something that really
happened.
When you look at a photograph, we are here right now, [LAUGH] but
we are looking at something that happened there and then.
And that all of these feelings we have,
all of these connotations that we have are then kind of jammed up against the fact
that it's something that really happened.
They we're looking at something that really happened.
And I think that's such a great power, that's such an incredible
manipulative power that photography has over any other kind of medium.
And that's why there's such a thing as what people call documentary photography,
that is a way to try to show us something about the truth.
Sarah MeisterCurator
