Artists

Mike Mandel, Larry Sultan

Press release

Opening: Friday, 29 May 2026, 5-8pm Zander Galerie Paris is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition showcasing a selection of fifty-six photographs from Evidence, the groundbreaking photographic project by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel. First exhibited and published in 1977, this seminal body of work fundamentally challenges the conventions of photography by presenting images without captions or contextual information, inviting viewers to question how meaning is constructed and perceived. Larry Sultan (1946–2009) and Mike Mandel (b. 1950) met at the San Francisco Art Institute and began their collaboration in 1973, at a time when conceptual art was redefining the role of photography. Their earlier projects, including Billboards (1973–89) and How to Read Music in One Evening (1974), already explored the circulation and framing of images within public and media spaces. Both artists were raised in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, a region shaped by postwar suburban expansion and a pervasive media culture that Sultan and Mandel would go on to interrogate throughout their careers. Evidence was created through an extensive archival process: Sultan and Mandel spent three years requesting and reviewing thousands of photographs from corporations, government agencies, and research institutions — including NASA, Bechtel, and the California Department of Corrections. From this vast trove, they selected seventy-nine images that, stripped of their original context, become strangely ambiguous, poetic, and unsettling. The result is a work that neither documents reality nor constructs fiction, but instead occupies an uncanny space between the two. The project remains prescient today, anticipating contemporary questions about the authority of the photographic image, the conditions under which images are produced, and the role of institutional power in shaping visual culture. A revised and expanded publication was released in 2003 by D.A.P., including additional material and an essay by Sandra S. Phillips, further cementing the work's enduring significance.