Evidence

In 1977, photographers Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel examined thousands of photographs in the archives of the Bechtel Corporation, the Beverly Hills Police Department, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Stanford Research Institute, and a hundred other corporations, government agencies, and educational, medical, and technical institutions. They were looking for photographs that were taken and used as transparent documents and purely objective instruments—in short, as evidence. Selecting 50 of the best, they printed these images with the care you would expect to find in a high-quality art photography book and published them in a simple, limited-edition volume titled Evidence. The concept of the book was clear: select photographs intended to be used as objective evidence and demonstrate that it is never that simple.