Parents, Porn Groups, and Bob’s Big Boy Collections: How Larry Sultan Filmed American Homelife | Photography

A A psychiatric review of Larry Sultan, conducted by the Army in 1969, described the American as an anxiety-prone individual who felt like a “careless observer looking in.” Sultan may not have been qualified to serve, but in that short phrase, the report identified the essential quality that would make him a great photographer of American domestic life.

The report was included in a new book, “Water Over Thunder,” which was published in collaboration with Sultan Kiri’s widow and son Max. In a career that began in the seventies and continued until his death in 2009 at the age of 63, Sultan was never limited to one artistic genre, but rather moved between documentary, fiction, and appropriation. He photographed ordinary middle-class homes in California’s San Fernando Valley, which were rented out for filming pornographic films, made a portrait of Paris Hilton in his parents’ bedroom, and took underwater photographs of people learning to swim in San Francisco.

He depicts it all with a hazy familiarity and an eye for specificity and irony. One day, Kerry said, “He hoped that by focusing on everyday life, he would be able to capture something mysterious that was out of sight. When life slows down, and you look between those big events that you’re thinking of capturing, you see the things that people live with every day, and that’s what really hits the heart.”

Born in Brooklyn in 1946 to Jewish parents, Sultan moved to Los Angeles with his family in 1950 as part of a “postwar quest for a better life,” the photographer says in a paragraph included in Water Over Thunder, the first publication devoted to his writing. His relationship with his father was complicated: “He was angry because I was an artist and he gave me a hard time. He called me a loser.”

Water Above Thunder unfolds as an informal autobiography, collecting Sultan’s thoughts on his early forays into photography and his thoughts on the subject, along with personal ephemera, diary entries, letters, postcards, and of course, his photographs. All this adds up to an intimate and unprecedented portrait of the photographer, as he put it.

Sultan grew up in the San Fernando Valley, and returned there to make The Valley, his porn epic. In the course of more than 100 shots, taken from 1998 to 2004, he captures the exquisite interiors of these rental homes, filled with ornately carved wooden furniture and soothing paintings of animals and nature, as well as zebra-print rugs and vases of faux flowers. Occasionally, we spot naked actors, relaxing between shoots with rollers in their hair, while fully clothed crew members organize their gear.

“Taylor sits in the shade completely exhausted,” he writes of one shot in which he sits. “She’s eating a piece of toast with raspberry jam. I can see that some crumbs have fallen on her bare stomach. As if apologizing, she explains that she hasn’t eaten all day because she doesn’t like to eat before an anal scene.”

“The Valley” was a visually charming, if somewhat uncomfortable, reimagining of the stereotypical American home as a theater of enacted desire, and yet Sultan makes you wonder whether his various scenes are so different from the theatrical imagining of modern American family life. “I feel like a forensic photographer searching for evidence,” he writes of The Valley. “I have planted squarely in the terrain of my contradictions—that rich, fertile field that straddles fascination and repulsion, desire and loss. I have come home again.”

Sultan described the house as “highly influential” and all of his major works were performed in and around the California suburbs. In the 1970s, he moved from the Valley to the Bay Area to study photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. “Times were very interesting,” he writes. “The streets were very interesting. So being a photographer allowed me to watch and participate in a way that felt appropriate to the mixture of alienation I felt.”

It was an exciting time for photography in the United States. Born in the 1970s was the Image Collective, a group of New York-based artists led by Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, who channeled photography, film, and performance into the burgeoning consumer culture. But the scene in San Francisco, Sultan wrote, “bored me to tears.” He continues: “I did not understand the language of academic criticism, and I did not feel comfortable sitting in the café culture.” Food was a different matter though. “I was interested in Bob’s Big Boy combo platters with Thousand Island dressing and French fries.”

Sultan befriended a fellow Art Institute student from San Fernando, Mike Mandel, with whom he shared a love of postwar pop music, postcards, billboards, and a “non-artistic view of the world.” The two became collaborators and, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, produced a groundbreaking and subversive work called Evidence, published in 1977.

Considered a guide to one of the first works of conceptual photography, it presents 59 black-and-white photographs without captions. Over the course of two years, the duo examined thousands of archival images belonging to government institutions and companies, including General Atomic, NASA, the US Navy, and Pacific Gas & Electric Company.

These images of crime scenes, scientific experiments and engineering tests, when taken out of their original context, become strange and even poetic. A man wearing a bag on his head was set on fire. The astronaut does push-ups; Men in hard hats stand in a sea of ​​white foam. They are images that capture the excitement of the dawning of an age of technological innovation and progress – but also the human need for progress, conquest and control.

Sultan was also willing to subject his life to scrutiny. His most famous work, Portraits from Home, depicts his elderly parents at home on the outskirts of the valley. They are fiddling with the vacuum cleaner, and his mother is wearing bright pink socks and a matching jacket. They play chess and argue in the corridor. His father, wearing tight pants, plays golf in the living room, with its memorable avocado walls and matching carpet.

Sultan used his parents as a symbol of how “Republicans had hijacked the family and family values ​​and turned it into an ideological tool. I felt that the family they were talking about was very oppressive, and I felt that the family was one of the most complex and troubling institutions. And yet, it is the institution that most of us believe in.”

The pictures have all the tenderness and affection found in a family album, albeit without the sentimentality. But they also talk about disillusionment with the American dream and its effect on family dynamics. Sultan’s father was an orphan, and despite his working-class background, he worked his way up to become Vice President of Schick Razors. But he lost his job in his 50s when the company was sold and never worked again.

Pictures from Home was the result of nine years he spent photographing and interviewing his parents. They became de facto collaborators, although in Water Over Thunder, Sultan recalls his nerves when he first showed them his prints, carefully placing the most flattering prints on top. “Even though I was going to show them pictures of themselves, I felt like I was about to say, ‘Let me show you what I really think of you’ — and reveal the thoughts and secrets I felt guilty about. There was no doubt about it, I was a bad son.”

Ahead of its time, Pictures from Home showed how private images can find a place in public spaces, encouraging us to examine how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen. It also demonstrated the therapeutic potential of art. “It allowed me to solve a lot of my problems with my family,” Sultan writes.

Water Over Thunder also tells us about the things Sultan was drawn to, including his book’s list of his five favorite films (No. 1: sci-fi classic The Incredible Shrinking Man). Teaching was as important to him as photography. This career began at his alma mater in 1978, and continued at California College of the Arts, where he was a professor in the photography department for two decades.

It started as a way to support his photography, but it quickly became a core part of his identity. He fondly describes his students as “fellow travelers.” The teaching schedule in the book includes discussions of Nan Goldin as well as dance lessons.

Artist Carmen Winant, who taught Sultan, remembers him as “a very funny, kind, sharp, and dedicated teacher.” What about his portrayal and influence? “He’s still a giant,” she says. “Although he had many endearing qualities, what I remember most was his curiosity. He would say, ‘Isn’t this endlessly wonderful?'”