Sharon Wild, from "The Valley" series

About the Photographer

Sultan, Larry

American, 1946-2009

When I was working on "Pictures from Home," my parents' voices – their stories as well as their arguments with my version of our shared history – were crucial to the book. They called into question the documentary truth the pictures seemed to carry. I wanted to subvert the sentimental home movies and snapshots with my more contentious images of suburban daily life, but at the same time I wished to subvert my images with my parents' insights into my point of view. – Larry Sultan, from an interview with Sheryl Conkelton in Flintridge Foundation Awards for Visual Arts 1999/2000.

"Pictures from Home" was a decade-long project Larry Sultan initiated when his father, Irving, was forced into early retirement from his career as vice president of the Schick Safety Razor Company. As initially conceived, the project was to be about "what happens when – as I interpreted my father's fate – corporations discard their no-longer-young employees, and how the resulting frustrations and feelings of powerlessness find their way into family relations," explains Sultan. While Irving continued to be Sultan's favored subject, the project evolved to include video stills from his family's home movies and the on-going commentary on Sultan's project by both of his parents. Interestingly, working in the San Fernando Valley suburbia where he grew up led Sultan to his next project, "The Valley" (1988-2004), an investigation of suburban houses used as pornographic film sets. The images eerily blend cinematic artificiality with mundane fixtures and details of the families who otherwise take up the spaces.

Larry Sultan was born in New York in 1946. In 1949 his family moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. He earned a BA in political science from the University of California at Santa Barbara (1968) and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1973). He is the recipient of a United States State Department International Arts and Lectures Grant (2000); four National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowships (1977, 1980, 1986, 1992) and an Art in Public Places Grant (1976); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1983). From 1992 to 1996 the traveling exhibition Larry Sultan: Pictures from Home was shown at Bronx Museum of Art, New York; Scottsdale Center for the Arts, Scottsdale, Arizona; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Chicago Cultural Center; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and San Jose Museum of Art, California. His work is part of numerous public collections, including those of the Art Institute of Chicago; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

[1] Rinehart,Bettie. "Mom-and-Pop Art," New Times. June 9, 1995. p. 65.