James White’s Evidence is not a reprint but a rejoinder. Published by MACK in 2022, the 104-page hardcover takes as its point of departure Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s well-known project of the same name, in which images drawn from the archives of more than a hundred US government agencies were made to yield surreal narratives without surrendering their deadpan, functional look. White, a painter, has long treated that book as a reference for his grayscale photographic paintings. Here he works directly with its example, assembling digital collages and manipulated photographs that interrupt the evidentiary contract of the source material.

The method is one of intervention. White does not simply reproduce archival images; he disrupts their surfaces with painterly gestures and digital operations, so that what was meant to document becomes unstable, ambiguous, and newly strange. The book’s large format—24 by 32 centimeters—and its silkscreened hardcover, printed with metallic ink, give the sequence a physical presence that supports this play of fact and artifice. It is a considered object, not a catalogue of reproductions.

Mandel and Sultan’s project remains a landmark in postwar photography for the way it questioned documentary authority. White’s volume extends that critique through another medium, testing how photographic evidence might be reworked by a painter’s hand and a collagist’s eye. The result is a book that belongs as much to the history of artists’ publications as to the literature of appropriation. Published in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, it will interest collectors who follow the continuing conversation between photography, painting, and the archive—and who value books that are themselves arguments about how images mean.