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 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.A ground-breaking project revisited at London’s Photographers’ Gallery. Photography has wrestled with many questions since its creation. One of the biggest issues of the last century was what makes a photograph art, and it was projects like Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s book/exhibition, Evidence, which helped transform the assumptions of the time. Evidence Revisited, at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, re-examines Mandel and Sultan’s classic show, originally mounted at the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art in 1977.Mike and Larry first met at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1973. They were both making their own work, but then they started collaborating, focusing on public art projects rather than studio practice. “They were interested in artistic ways of approaching visual practice,” explains Clare Grafik, curator at the Photographers’ Gallery. Helped by a grant, they started approaching a huge number of non-art-related archives in order to explore the photographs in their collections. At the time, transforming the results into a body of artistic work was still a fresh concept - something that many artists have adapted since, particularly in the past decade.  The curation of the resulting show was not on artistic merit – it was much more instinctive. Sultan and Mandel looked through close to one million images. They chose whatever struck a chord. By removing an image from its original context it forces the viewer to question how the images are used as facts, and the artists deliberately made no attempt to put narrative into the show. Instead, they fought against making any conscious juxtapositions, knowing that human instinct is drawn to make natural connections. The legacy of Evidence was huge, most importantly in photographic book publishing. As Grafik observes, “It was the surprise that people got from seeing a beautifully printed book in a very fine art way, with images at odds with anything they assumed to be artistic style.” Until the late-80s, the book form was the main locus for photographs, and it’s only in recent years that we also think of the gallery. Evidence makes us aware of the importance of the book’s potential as an “object”, while the show forces us to remember that photographs aren’t just “artistic”. Evidence Competition Curate your own photography exhibition from the BBC archives in a unique competition brought to you by Collective and The Photographers' Gallery. Prizes include Associate Membership to The Photographers' Gallery and copes if the Evidence book.  evidencecompetition
Francesca Gavin
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