James White’s ‘Evidence’ Is a Painter’s Treatise on Photography

In 1977, the Californian duo Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel self-published Evidence. Beautifully printed with 59 uncaptioned black and white photographs, the book was as elegant as it was inscrutable. It was a collection of found images. The ‘authors’ had scoured US institutional archives, looking through two million photos of laboratory experiments, mechanical and electrical installations, testing facilities, fire departments and would-be crime scenes. Many images were completely mysterious, offering no clue as to why they had even been made: men in hard hats standing knee-deep in a field of white foam; a gloved hand holding out a loop of thick rope; a tangle of cables emerging from an office wall and spreading across a desk like a creeping vine. Ripped out of context, the photos had lost all purpose. Now the strange energy and occult psychological charge of these orphaned pictures could run wild. Photographs were shown to be essentially unruly, and functional only under very controlled conditions. The book’s title, in gilt letters on deep blue cloth, looked authoritative but it unnerved. Packaged in a coolly intellectual concept, this was a showcase for the unhinged madness of photography.

Evidence arrived as the sun was setting on conceptualism, and a new dawn heralded postmodern appropriation, the pictures generation and the turn, by all manner of artists, toward archives. The 1,600 copies sold out in two years. It became a cult classic and a particular favourite of artists who taught. I have seen copies on the shelves of John Baldessari, Keith Arnatt and Victor Burgin. If you want to show students how photographs ‘work’, there is no better place to start. Reprints in 2003 and 2017 extended the project’s gnomic allure, which is undimmed after 45 years.

And now we have a book of the same title by British painter James White. At first, it feels like a remix of Sultan and Mandel’s own. The same photographs are there but they have been sliced in two, flipped or cropped. Each is partly obscured by an opaque or translucent monochrome stripe: black, white, grey, silver. Angle the book to the light and you can see picture varnish on these areas. Long dragging brushstrokes, inexpressive but careful, are visible through the sheen. The eye is drawn to the layers. What are we looking at, exactly?

White’s Evidence (2022) is a side project. By day he paints in great detail from black and white photographs that feel half forensic, half drinks party wreckage. A camera flash gleams off glasses, furniture, telephones or kitchen appliances. His narratives are lost, or never were. His previous work shares a family resemblance to the Sultan and Mandel images, but the camera’s mechanical stare is translated into deft paint swatches, with a surface almost as slick as a photo. He paints on wood or plexiglass, leaving either a margin empty, so we can see the support, or filled with monochrome strokes. His approach comes less from the illusions of photorealism, which flourished in the 1970s, than a desire to estrange each medium enough to make it pleasurably but dryly thinkable. How do cameras ‘see’? What is reproduction? What is the surface of a painting derived from a photograph?

When you see a painting reproduced in a book you intuit that the thing itself is somewhere else. Hanging on a gallery wall, perhaps. But a photograph on the page seems to belong there, a chameleon settling in. Hence the book form long being central to the artistic development of photography. White’s Evidence, however, scrambles such distinctions. Yes, there is photography here, twice appropriated, and yes, there is painting. But the closer you look – and this book really is about close looking – the more it seems that what we see exists only here, on and for the page. These are not works made in a painter’s studio, and this is not an illustrated catalogue of artefacts; it is an ‘artist’s book’ in the true sense. The whole effect has been brought together in collaboration with the master bookmaking skills for which the publisher, Mack, is justly celebrated.

If White’s book is an homage to Sultan and Mandel’s work, it is also an homage to the makers of the photographs they selected, their names long lost. And if this book is evidence, it is of the unsettling notion that, for all their apparent factuality, photographs do not have inherent meanings. They have potential meanings, and they are unpredictable. It is evidence too that a painter can be best placed to contemplate this. 

_{Main image and thumbnail: James White, Evidence, 2022. Courtesy: the artist and MACK}