These voices work with and against the photographs, sometimes confirming the apparent reality of the pictures and sometimes contradicting their purported documentary truth. Or is it the reverse?
Larry Sultan (1946-2009) from New York, grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley, which became a source of inspiration for a number of his projects. His work blends documentary and staged photography to create images of the psychological as well as physical landscape of suburban family life. Sultan’s pioneering book and exhibition ‘Pictures From Home’ (1992) was a decade long project that features his own mother and father as its primary subjects, exploring photography’s role in creating familial mythologies. Using this same suburban setting, his book, ‘The Valley’ (2004) examined the adult film industry and the area’s middle-class tract homes that serve as pornographic film sets. ‘Katherine Avenue’, (2010) the exhibition and book, explored Sultan’s three main series, ‘Pictures From Home’, ‘The Valley’, and ‘Homeland’ along side each other to further examine how Sultan’s images negotiate between reality and fantasy, domesticity and desire, as the mundane qualities of the domestic surroundings become loaded cultural symbols. In 2012, the monograph, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel was published to examine in depth the thirty plus year collaboration between these artists as they tackled numerous conceptual projects together that includes ‘Billboards’, ‘How to Read Music In One Evening’, ‘Newsroom’, and the seminal photography book ‘Evidence’, a collection of found institutional photographs, first published in 1977.
Larry Sultan’s work has been exhibited and published widely and is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he was also recognized with the Bay Area Treasure Award in 2005. Sultan served as a Distinguished Professor of Photography at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Pictures From Home
‘The house is quiet. They have gone to bed, leaving me alone, and the electric timer has just switched off the living-room lights. It feels like the house has finally turned on its side to fall asleep. Years ago I would have gone through my mother’s purse for one of her cigarettes and smoked in the dark. It was a magical time that the house was mine.
Tonight, however, I am restless. I sit at the dining-room table; rummage through the refrigerator. What am I looking for?
All day long I’ve been scavenging, poking around in rooms and closets, peering at their things, studying them. I arrange my rolls of exposed film into long rows and count and recount them as if they were lost. There are twenty-eight.
What drives me to continue this work is difficult to name. It has more to do with love than with sociology, with being a subject in the drama rather than a witness. And in the odd and jumbled process of working everything shifts; the boundaries blur, my distance slips, the arrogance and illusion of immunity falters. I wake up in the middle of the night, stunned and anguished. These are my parents. From that simple fact, everything follows. I realize that beyond the rolls of film and the few good pictures, the demands of my project and my confusion about its meaning, is the wish to take photography literally. To stop time. I want my parents to live forever.’
Larry Sultan: An excerpt from Chapter One of Pictures From Home, 1992
In 1982, while visiting his parents in Los Angeles, Larry Sultan pulled out a box of old home movies the family had not watched in years. Astounded by the films, Sultan later commented, “They were remarkable, more like a record of hopes and fantasies than of actual events. It was as if my parents had projected their dreams onto film emulsion.”
Family albums, reels of home movies, and the tales they prompt all help to construct and define, individually and collectively the term “family”. What is pictured on the album page or living room wall and what is left unpictured attests to a common desire for a tale of domestic happiness. In his project ‘Pictures from Home’ (1982–91), Larry Sultan used his own contemporary photographs as pendants to his parents’ old movies and snapshots, exploring a complete, more complex sense of family. The chronological distance separating these two components raises questions of history, memory and time. The child photographing his parents reverses the social norm, complicating the sense of power, identity, and self-creation experienced on either side of the camera.
Sultan’s photographs his parents as they go about their live; post-corporate retirement for his father and entrepreneurial home-selling for his mother against the quintessential backdrop of the American dream: a ranch house in the suburbs, a heated garage, and wall-to-wall carpeting. Accompanying the photographs, their voices fill the pages and wall spaces of the project as they contemplate their current relationship to one another:
– ‘So your mother is my best friend, but the truth is, that trust is a fragile thing and can be easily broken. Our real problem is how I get irritated and how that can escalate’.
– ‘Really, sometimes he can be very sweet, but other times I feel that I have to tiptoe around him, that any moment he’ll turn on me. You know that look of his, it burns right through you’.
Sultan himself also enters the dialogue, discussing the project and the different narratives of their shared history with his father:
– ‘There are no clear lines—I don’t know where you stop and I start. And it’s crossed my mind that perhaps I’m out to justify my own life, my choices, by questioning yours’.
– ‘You worry too much. I’m really happy to help you with your project. Seriously. I just wanted you to know that for the most part that’s not me I recognize in those pictures’.
This series is interesting, looking into the lives of a middle aged/elderly couple who are now able to enjoy their home and company with their child/children all grown up and moved out, seeing how they live, interact with each other and their hobbies. I think these images give the audience a pleasant look into Sultan’s parent’s lives. These photographs portray the relationship between husband and wife, their life together, their home and their individual characteristics and hobbies. I think these images show a personal relation with the viewer by allowing the photographer (even though he is their son) to capture them in their home, even though the photographs don’t portray the same kind of personal connection then with Billingham’s work of his parents (portraying the ups and downs in their relationship) but that’s the difference between Billingham and Sultan’s series. Sultan’s family is different to Billingham’s, they live in an American Suburb, they have/ had their careers, they’re in a different social class then Billingham’s family, as suggested by the Sultan’s house, décor, hobbies and lifestyle.
Within this series, there are photographs taken individually between the couple which I find appealing having a variety of images in the series not just solely focused on the couple together, I think by having separate shots mixed with images of the two together gives the audience a sense of defining the parents are individual people and not just as a married couple. It allows the viewer to get to know them and their personalities more, such as for images 4, 5 and 8. Image 4 illustrates the wife, possibly on a day off from work, to recreationally sunbath in the garden, maybe be a pool and relax. Frames 5 and 8 are depicting the husband in two of his hobbies that he enjoys now that he’s retired, lounging in the pool and golf. However the photographs of the couple together, gives us an insight into their relationship, as you see them together sat at the table or in bed reading together, having conversations. This variety of shots gives the series more intrigued and life whereas I think if it was a series full of photos of the couple together, after a while I’d feel as though it would become tedious.
I like the way Sultan has utilized composition within his images, creating aesthetically pleasing photographs, using shapes and lines of objects and the body to enhance the subject, such as in frame 5 of the husband holding his inflatable lilo, the use of the lines from the window frame nicely leads the eye to the subject. I think the use of lighting is complimentary to the work, whether it be from natural light, ambient light or both, it pleasing highlights the whole frame or creates interesting contrasts of the shadows and highlights. And the vibrant colour works nicely into the series, complimenting the subjects and portraying their personality through the use of colours and patterns within the interior.
I find this series of work to be interesting and nicely done, I feel as though I know who these people are like through the use of the décor, the way they dress and present themselves and through their recreational down time. The audience is able to connect with the images on a personal level and feel apart of the work as well.