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 extant 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. The idea of whether or not a photograph is any longer going to be a pointer toward something that we can believe in is probably, really up for grabs. The photograph is a complete abstraction, really from the get go, from the fact that we use different f-stops to create different depths of field. Different illusions of motion, and different dark room capabilities of enhancing contrast, and all the things that are kind of built into photography that people just totally ignore, and just read right through, and just go, oh, that's what really happens. [LAUGH] Though it's not what really happened, it's a picture, it's just a picture.
