The enormously influential and classic 1977 photobook of found institutional photography, drawn from various archives, and presented uncaptioned thus unmoored from their original context. Edited by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel; afterword by Robert F. Forth. Unpaginated [72 pages]; 59 full-page duo-toned b&amp;w plates; 10 x 9.25 inches. List of government agencies, educational institutions and corporations that permitted access to their files.

Evidence

Mandel, Mike

Larry Sultan

Clatworthy Colorvues

San Francisco Plays Itself utilizes the notion of autobiography as a way to explore the work of contemporary artists who have engaged with the cultural and physical landscape of the Bay Area. Featuring more than 35 photographs by 31 artists, accompanying texts provide a contextualizing articulation by each artist of his or her work that serves to emphasize the autobiographical focus in egalitarian terms. The cumulative effect of these projects exemplifies the evolution of a specific time and place, while representing the unlimited experiences and possibilities of life in a major American metropolitan region. INCLUDING WORK &amp; CONTRIBUTIONS BY: John Chiara, Mark Citret, Judy Dater, Kota Ezawa, Alex Fradkin, Jona Frank, Richard Gilles, Jim Goldberg, Katy Grannan, John Harding, Chauncey Hare, Christina Koci Hernandez, Zig Jackson, Michael Jang, Keba Konte, Annie Leibovitz, Alice Waters, Ken Light, Ari Marcopoulos, Mary Ellen Mark, Laura Albert, Ken Miller, William Vollmann, Richard Misrach, Abelardo Morell, Dan Nicoletta, Gus Van Sant, Catherine Opie, Adam Klein, Michael Rauner, Alice Shaw, Shi Guorui, Larry Sultan, Sergio De La Torre, Tseng Kwong Chi, Catherine Wagner, and Mary Gaitskill. 
PLUS THE NEW CD BY THE SIZE QUEENS featuring guest appearances by Laura Albert, Carlos Forster, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Tim Mooney, John Murry, Danny Pearson, and Terese Taylor.

An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Parts 1 & 2, Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself

Arts & Photography

Alice Waters

Catherine Opie

MARY GAITSKILL

Abelardo Morell

Mary Ellen Mark

Richard Misrach

Chauncey Hare

Gus Van Sant

John Chiara

Laura Albert

Shi Guorui

The Size Queens

Photography & Video

SF Camerawork Publications

In 1977, photographers Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel sifted through thousands of photographs in the files of the Bechtel Corporation, the Beverly Hills Police Department, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, the U.S. Department of the Interior, Stanford Research Institute and a hundred other corporations, American government agencies, and educational, medical and technical institutions. They were looking for photographs that were made and used as transparent documents and purely objective instruments--as evidence, in short. Selecting 50 of the best, they printed these images with the care you would expect to find in a high-quality art photography book, publishing them in a simple, limited-edition volume titled Evidence. The concept for the book was clear: select photographs intended to be used as objective evidence and show that it is never that simple. Now an undisputed classic in the photo world, considered a seminal harbinger of conceptual photography, Evidence is nearly impossible to find. This new edition is being published in recognition of the project's continued relevance, and will contain a facsimile copy of the original book plus a newly commissioned scholarly essay by Sandra Phillips of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Additionally, this edition will include a new spread of images and a group of black-and-white illustrations selected by the artists from an archive of photographs that were not included in the original book.

Mike Mandel

Distributed Art Publishers

‘I wanted to do something so absolutely different, and physical, and in a certain way, kind of ill-conceived... I took my camera and went underwater in a bunch of pools. And made pictures.’ Between 1978 and 1982, in a departure from the collaborative conceptual work that he had become known for, Larry Sultan photographed people learning to swim in public pools in San Francisco. Initially inspired by black-and-white documentary photographs he found in a Red Cross swimming manual, Sultan soon began exploring an urge to create pictures that were physical, sensual, immersive, and painterly. The resulting work is saturated with colour and inflected by the unpredictable forms and chance abstractions which emerge through the distorted refractions of the water as a second lens. Often beautiful and regularly unsettling in their ambiguity, the series builds to create a feeling of sensory immersion alive with the fluid and uncertain atmospheres that Sultan was drawn to with. This collection includes all the pictures from the series Sultan himself chose and exhibited, and expands to include additional images he marked on contact sheets as well as further selections from his archive which he likely never even reviewed. With new essays by Philip Gefter and Erin O’Toole

Swimmers

MACK BOOKS

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Books by Larry Sultan