75 Reasons to Live: Catherine Wagner on Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s Untitled, from the installation Evidence

Catherine Wagner is an artist, and she's speaking here about Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan's series Evidence (1977). She describes her reaction to seeing this sequence of photographs culled from corporate and institutional archives: “Here's somebody who's taking the risk to open up the parameters of the ways in which we think about photography.“ One correction to Wagner's account: Rather than rearranging the photographs on site once they had been installed, Mandel was sent a mock-up of the proposed installation before the fact. He responded with more information and the curators adjusted their plan according to his instructions.Remember the end of Manhattan, when Woody Allen asks himself what makes life worth living? In January 2010, during SFMOMA's three-day 75th anniversary celebration, 75 people from the Bay Area creative community gave extremely short talks — 7.5 minutes or less! — on a single collection work of their choosing. Someone called it “manic splendor“ — and it was. You can view all of the talks on The Anniversary Show exhibition page. Or look for them here, on Open Space.