In 1977, photographers Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel examined thousands of photographs in the archives of Bechtel Corporation, the Beverly Hills Police Department, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the US Department of the Interior, the Stanford Research Institute and a hundred other corporations, government agencies, and educational, medical and technical institutions. They sought photographs made and used as transparent documents and purely objective instruments—in short, as evidence. Selecting fifty of the best, they printed them with the care expected of a high-quality fine-art photography book and published them in a plain, limited-edition volume titled Evidence.
 
The concept was clear: select photographs intended as objective evidence and demonstrate that things are never so simple. Now an undisputed photographic classic and a seminal precursor of conceptual photography, Evidence has become almost impossible to find. This reprint of DAP's 2004 facsimile edition acknowledges the project's continuing relevance. It contains a facsimile of the original book alongside a newly commissioned scholarly essay by Sandra Phillips of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It also includes a new sequence of images and a group of black-and-white illustrations selected by the artists from an archive of photographs not included in the original book.