Mike Mandel & Chantal Zakari: Accidental Evidence
Center Gallery
November 6-30, 2025
Press Release
Opening Reception: Friday, September 5, 5–8pm, the artists will be signing books at the opening.
Accidental Evidence book cover, offset, 2025
This show consists of the original prints which are the result of make-ready accidents that we discovered on press during the 2024 printing of Evidence. In offset printing, the make-ready is a stack of paper that runs through the press to adjust the inks for printing. To eliminate waste, make-ready sheets of different signatures are printed multiple times, resulting in chance intersections of images. Accidental Evidence is the result of these chaotic interactions.
Evidence has been in print for nearly fifty years, and many in the photographic community are familiar with the book’s images and structure. It is a carefully organized sequence of facing pages. In contrast, Accidental Evidence explodes, unleashing chance interactions of images that invade each other. Photographs that appear in different sections of Evidence are now mashed together. The first photo in this book is the last in Evidence. Lists and texts meant to contextualize the photographs now intersect the images directly. We have embraced these little accidents and, in doing so, constructed a new sequence that playfully undermines the original. Some of the Evidence make-ready sheets were printed on top of the poetic landscapes by UK photographer Faraz Ravi for his book Seasons of the Fallen. In Evidence, images of the land are merely backdrops for experiments and tests. In contrast, the warm-toned flora from Seasons of the Fallen takes root. To recreate the richness of overlapping layers of ink, Accidental Evidence is printed with five colors. As the book unfolds, layer upon layer of ink dominates the pages, and Evidence lies buried beneath.
Individual original press prints and the entire original set will be for sale through the gallery. The artists will be signing books at the opening.
Artist Bios
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 Baseball-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.
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 webAffairs (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.
Accidental Evidence page 21, offset, 2025
Accidental Evidence make ready, offset, 2024
Accidental Evidence press sheet, offset, 2025
Accidental Evidence book cover, offset, 2025
Accidental Evidence page 1, offset, 2025
Accidental Evidence page 28, 29, 30, offset, 2025