A few hundred miles north of Paris Photo Los Angeles, the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco is holding an exhibition devoted to Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel until the end of May, as well as an excerpt from their incredible editorial collaboration, Evidence (1977). The book, composed exclusively of photos taken from American industrial and governmental archives, is an early demonstration of the photographic sequence as a photographic act. Evidence consists of 59 images and is out-of-print, although not impossible to find.
For the exhibition, Stephen Wirtz took care to begin his selection of 20 pieces of evidence with the first nine photographs of the book. The excerpt on display, a juxtaposition of crime scenes, aeronautical tests, industrial and agricultural experiments—photographic documents produced in different eras but intended to serve as documentation and evidence—give a sour taste of the dehumanized world designed by Sultan and Mandel using company archives.
Friends since their days at the San Francisco Art Institute, Sultan and Mandel have never stopped exploring the possibility of reappropriating archives in the public domain, then exhibiting them in a different form in public space.
This coveted space, which we no longer know whether to call public or private in the Internet age, had a physical equivalent in the 1970s: outdoor advertising. Back then, Sultan & Mandel took over billboards to advertise false utopias. They designed the posters, put them up with glue and long brushes, and then photographed the posters in their context to allow for two modes of dissemination. The contextual photographs are exhibited at the Stephen Wirtz gallery and accompanied by a video of their process. The video of the posters is like a making-of, evidence of their performance like the evidence displayed in the adjoining room.
Viewers lucky enough to get a glimpse of Stephen Wirtz’s personal collection will be able to see photographs sent by radio during World War II. Produced to convey a political message and shape public opinion, these skillfully posed radio photographs shed an interesting light on conflict photography.
EXHIBITION
Larry Sultan & Mike Mandel
“We make you us”
From March 6th to May 31th, 2014
Stephen Wirtz Gallery
49 Geary Street, 3rd Floor
CA 94108 San Francisco
USA
