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| Larry Sultan. Canal District, San Rafael, 2006 |
Opening today and running until July 23 this major retrospective examines the work and career of Larry Sultan
(American, 1946–2009) an internationally renowned photographer with
deep ties to the SF Bay Area as both an artist and an educator. Sultan’s
often intensely personal images — many drawn from his own family’s
history — blend documentary and staged elements in their explorations of
storytelling, family, and domesticity.
Larry Sultan: Here and Home explores the artist’s 35-year
career through more than 200 photographs, a billboard created with
conceptual artist and frequent collaborator Mike Mandel, a film, and
Study Hall — a room offering a unique glimpse into Sultan’s exploratory
process. Works on view include Sultan’s early collaborative projects of
the 1970s, made with Mandel, as well as his later work including
Pictures from Home (1983–92),
The Valley (1997–2003), and
Homeland (2006–09).
You can see more on the SF MOMA website
HERE.
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| Larry Sultan, from the series Pictures From Home, 1984 |
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| Larry Sultan, from the series Pictures From Home, 1984 |
Coinciding with the SF MOMA show MACK BOOKS have reissued and updated Larry Sultan's seminal 1992 bookwork
Pictures From Home.
MACK says this:
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.’ – Larry Sultan
First published in 1992 to wide critical acclaim,
Pictures From Home
is Larry Sultan’s pendant to his parents. Sultan returned home to
Southern California periodically in the 1980s and the decade-long
sequence moves between registers, combining contemporary photographs
with film stills from home movies, fragments of conversation, Sultan’s
own writings and other memorabilia. The result is a narrative collage in
which the boundary between the documentary and the staged becomes
increasingly ambiguous. Simultaneously the distance usually maintained
between the photographer and his subjects also slips in an exchange of
dialogue and emotion that is unique to this work.
Significantly increasing the page count of the original book, this MACK design of
Pictures From Home
clarifies the multiplicity of voices – both textual and pictorial – in
order to afford a fresh perspective of this seminal body of work.
Emphasizing the cinematic motion of the family’s home videos, the
Super-8 film stills have been newly digitized and magnified, with select
scenes running full-bleed across double-page spreads. Meanwhile,
Sultan’s photographs of his parents as they go about their daily lives –
against the quintessential backdrop of the Reagan-era American dream –
are supplemented with previously unpublished images. Most significantly,
the book honours Sultan as the oft-hailed ‘King of Colour Photography’.
You can read more on the MACK BOOKS website
HERE.
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| Larry Sultan - Pictures From Home |
