Page detail from Accidental Evidence by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari

Many photographers and photo historians are familiar with the groundbreaking book Evidence, initially released in 1977 by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan. The collection of images, taken, liberated, or perhaps recycled from government archives, presents both the oddity and absurdity of the photographic frame and a meditation on the subjectivity of truth. These images reveal not only the limits of reality contained in a single photograph but also the systems that shape how we perceive it.

Evidence (1977) by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel next to Accidental Evidence (2025) by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari

The impetus for the photographers who created these images is deceptively simple: each picture exists as evidence of something that is happening—or has happened—usually an event that we, as viewers, have no context for. The identity of the photographer for each image is never revealed, simply the origin of where they came from. Their intentions are buried within layers of content that often include elements deemed mistakes or poorly composed by conventional photographic standards.

Page from Accidental Evidence by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari

Fifty years have passed since the book’s initial release, providing viewers ample time to reflect on how social, political, environmental, and economic systems have changed—or remained unchanged.

Cover detail of Accidental Evidence by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari

Accidental Evidence (2025) by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari directly engages with this gap in time, exploring how accidents and material processes can generate new meaning. The book is built from “make-ready” sheets discovered during the press run for the fifth printing of Evidence in Istanbul. These sheets, used initially to calibrate ink and alignment, bear layered images—sometimes from Evidence itself, sometimes from Faraz Rafi’s Seasons of the Fallen. The result is a visual palimpsest in which content overlaps, collides, and is partially obscured, producing pages that are at once dark, confusing, and richly textured. What emerges is an accidental collaboration across time and authorship, in which the past and present interact.

Page from Accidental Evidence by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari showing duplication of differing registration marks.

Images invade one another, ruthlessly asserting their presence, and invite viewers to navigate the relationships between foreground and background, as well as vertical and horizontal planes. This visual complexity reflects the present moment, in which content is continually recycled, recontextualized, and repurposed to uphold systems of power. The warmth of Rafi’s landscapes contrasts sharply with the colder, harsher imagery of Evidence, creating a tension that reinforces the book’s meditation on time, memory, and societal inertia.

Page from Accidental Evidence by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari

In embracing these accidents of layering and unexpected intersections of disparate works, Accidental Evidence transforms what was once archival material into a site of contemporary exploration. This reimagined book unsettles order, reshapes sequences, and expands the way we see, showing that meaning is never fixed—it emerges in moments of chance, interaction, and attention.

Spread from Accidental Evidence by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari

Spread from Accidental Evidence by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari

Spread from Accidental Evidence by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari

Spread from Accidental Evidence by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari

Spread from Accidental Evidence by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari

Spread from Accidental Evidence by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari

Spread from Accidental Evidence by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari

Spread from Accidental Evidence by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari

Spread from Accidental Evidence by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari

Spread from Accidental Evidence by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari

Accidental Evidence by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari

Accidental Evidence by Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari is available through The Corner.

Mike Mandel is a conceptual photographer known for his artist’s books: Myself: Timed Exposures (1971), Seven Never Before Published Portraits of Edward Weston (1974), The Base-ball-Photographer Trading Cards (1975), and Making Good Time (1989). In 1977, Mandel and Larry Sultan collaborated on the seminal photographic book Evidence, a book comprised of file photographs from engineering, corporate, and government agencies. A publication of Mandel’s 1970s conceptual projects, Good 70s, was published by J & L Books and D.A.P. in 2015. In 2017, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibited a solo show of this work. In 2017 People in Cars was published by Stanley/Barker and Robert Mann Gallery. Zone Eleven, a series of surprising photographs by Ansel Adams retrieved from various Adams archives, was published by Damiani in 2021.

Follow Mike Mandell on Instagram @mikemandel1816

Chantal Zakari is an interdisciplinary artist, designer and a professor at the SMFA at Tufts University. Committed to the creation of artworks that are accessible to a wide audience, her studio practice has embraced the rapid changes in reproduction and distribution of book and printed ephemera. She has self-published several artist’s books: PicSpill (2025), Pictures from the Outside (2023), Arsenal News (2020), Drop Dead Gorgeous (2020), and webAf-fairs (2005). Her work was shown at The ICP NY, ICA Boston, Lothringer13 Munich, FotoFocus Cincinnati, and other venues, and reviewed in Artforum, ArtPapers, Afterimage, Wired, Le Monde, Boston Globe, Lenscratch amongst others. Her work is in the collection of Yale University, the Addison Gallery of American Art, and her artist’s books are in many private and public book collections.

Under the imprint of Eighteen Publications, together, Mandel and Zakari publish their collaborative artist’s books. The State of Ata (2010) speaks to the clash between Islam and secularism in Turkey. It weaves together photographs, interviews, artists’ interventions and archival imagery. They Came to Baghdad (2012) is a response to the Iraq War, and Lockdown Archive (2015) is a record of all the images uploaded to the web that relate to the military occupation of Watertown after the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013. Shelter in Plates is a series of six commemorative plates that is a companion project to Lockdown Archive.
Accidental Evidence (2025) is their most recent collaboration.

Follow Chantal Zakari on Instagram @show.n.tll

Shawn Bush is a lens-based artist who grew up in Detroit, MI. His photographs and collages reflect overdeveloped systems, distorted icons, and collapsing mythologies.
Bush earned an MFA from RISD and a BA from Columbia College Chicago. He is a 2025 LightWork and Aurora + Herron Artist in Residence, a 2021 recipient of the Aperture CreatorLabs Photo Fund, included in the 2022 Silver List, a 2021 Wyoming Arts Council Fellow, and a recipient of the 2023 Kodak Visionary Project Award.

Follow Shawn Bush on Instagram @notthatbush