Evidence / [compiled by] Larry Sultan, Mike Mandel ; [essay by] Sandra S. Phillips ; afterword by Robert F. Forth.

"Mike Mandel's and Larry Sultan's Evidence is a collection of found and recontextualized images taken from public and private American institutions, corporations, and agencies. In 1977, after sorting through the local picture archives at a California NASA office, the young artists, just out of their graduate studies, received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to continue the work in other such spaces. After sorting through a hundred archives that chronicled America's frontier into the technologically advanced future, they carefully selected a dynamic batch of images to be sequenced loosely into a book and exhibition. The book is considered a seminal foundation for a new conceptual practice based in photographic mediums that attempt to decentralize the once-triumphed pinnacles in photography-as-art: narrative and authorship. In contemporary photographic discourses, owning the image one creates (or more accurately, uses) no longer suggests an ethical or artistic quandary, rather an interesting intersection of art and politics"--Ahorn Magazine archive.