Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel brings together the unusually concentrated collaboration that these two American photographers pursued from 1973 to 1985. Published by König, Walther in 2012, the 263-page hardcover surveys a body of work made across twelve years, when Sultan and Mandel developed nineteen joint projects while also maintaining their individual practices. The book’s subject is therefore not a single series, but an artistic partnership and the range of forms through which it worked.
Its scope includes the artist books How To Read Music In One Evening and Evidence, a sequence of twelve billboards combining hand-painted photographs, silkscreens, oil paintings, and digital prints, as well as the film JPL and the installation Newsroom. Several of these projects are brought together in book form here, giving the volume the character of an overview rather than a narrowly defined monograph. The numerous illustrations make the shifts between photographic image, reproduction, moving image, and installation central to the reading experience.
The collaboration emerged during the photographers’ master’s studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and was shaped by their opposition to the post-Beat and Cafe Society art scene in San Francisco. That context matters because their work treats photography less as a transparent record than as material to be selected, rearranged, and tested across different media. Evidence, their 1977 collaborative work, is described in the supplied material as a landmark in photobook history; the present volume places it within the broader continuity of their shared experiments rather than allowing it to stand alone.
For collectors, the book is especially valuable as a sustained record of collaboration: it shows how two distinct photographic practices could produce a coherent, cross-media body of work over time. With its German-language cataloging, 2012 publication date, and substantial illustrated survey format, it offers a focused way to encounter the partnership as a whole. ISBN 9783865607447 identifies this König, Walther publication.
