ABSTRACT
Surrealist photography often points to the readymade agency of objects, and their capacity to disrupt conventional ways of seeing. In this chapter, the author takes up this idea of the authority of objects in relation to how the camera's mechanical nature has enabled distinctive collaborative approaches. As Thomas Albright put it in a review of that exhibition, "Every photograph is, in a sense, a 'found object' with a frame around it". In using found photographs, Evidence thus relies on an idea of photography as a readymade. The readymade, of course, fundamentally concerns the question of artistic labor, or its apparent absence. Photography has long been recognized as a deskilled technology of reproduction. The collaborative work of the Bechers, Sultan and Mandel, and Broomberg and Chanarin is nonetheless paradoxical. Marcel Duchamp’s installation 1200 Bags of Coal is an important precursor to the interest in quantification among conceptual artists.
