



1 / 11 Chevron Chevron COURTESY CASEMORE KIRKEBY AND ESTATE OF LARRY SULTAN “My Mother Posing for Me,” 1984.

In the mid-nineteen-eighties, when he was the head of the photography program at the San Francisco Art Institute, Larry Sultan hired me as an adjunct faculty member—the beginning of our lifelong friendship. I’d visit him often in his studio at the Headlands Center for the Arts, in a converted old military barracks at the foot of Rodeo Beach. Assembled on the wall was a grid of small film stills he had made from his family’s home movies, the beginning of his series “Pictures From Home.” When I’d walk in, he’d be standing there, staring at the grid, sipping a little Scotch, moving a few pictures around, having himself some fun. We might talk for a while about the cinematic rhythm of the grid, the psychological clues residing in this scavenged record of his childhood, or about whether this kind of personal documentation had any cultural relevance at all. Then, invariably, we would head out for a late-afternoon hike on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific and sit there for a while, the vastness of the ocean an open platform for our free-floating conversations. Sometimes we plumbed the deeply personal, at other times the wilds of Derrida or Foucault, but, by the time the sun was levitating just above the horizon, our serious musings had devolved into a bunch of goofy laughter.

One day, we were talking about intelligence—what composes it, how it’s manifest, agreeing that academic aptitude alone is not what propels civilization forward. I wondered aloud if all great ideas didn’t have some fundamental emotional source, like the Wright brothers’ impulse to fly, for example. Larry then said something that stopped me in my tracks: “Isn’t imagination really the final measure of intelligence?” It was the most obvious thing in the world—and revelatory—but it had never occurred to me before. He seemed always to have such observations, casually offered, as if in an afterthought, and, because of it, I always found myself learning something when I was with him.

In 1983, after completing a series of conceptual collaborations with his classmate Mike Mandel, including their masterpiece “Evidence,” Larry embarked on a personal opus, “Pictures from Home.” The photo series was completed in 1991, and has recently been republished by Mack Books. An exploration of his own childhood undertaken through an almost forensic scrutiny of his family, the project presents a combination of still images culled from home movies, contemporary photographs that Sultan took of his mother and father in their affluent Palm Springs retirement community, and conversations he recorded with them. Larry mined the memories and musings of his parents, Jews who had migrated from New York to California in the late nineteen-forties; he was interested in their ideas about creating a home, and their values and desires in pursuit of the good life, but he was equally interested in exploring the act of documentation itself. He wondered how to navigate his paradoxical role as a “subject in the drama rather than a witness.”

It was a running joke between us that Larry’s contemplation of his childhood in “Pictures from Home” got him as far as puberty. For his next body of work, he returned to the neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley where his own sexuality had formed. In “The Valley” (1998–2003), he documented pornographic-film production in suburban homes rented out for that purpose. One picture, from 2001, “Sharon Wild,” presents an archetypal figure sitting undressed on the edge of a bed with her arms folded across her chest—the Hitchcock blonde gone bad. I can imagine Larry standing with his camera in the doorway of that suburban bedroom, the resonance of his own parents’ bedroom summoning the sixteen-year-old in him all over again. Sharon sits there in bra and panties, looking at the camera tentatively, her arms folded gracefully, self-protectively. Larry saw beyond the porn actress, more exposed in the intimacy of a quiet moment in front of a stranger’s camera than when she was performing before a cast and crew. “The Valley” is a visual contemplation of an animal impulse in the context of late capitalism, activated by the artifices and edifices of the American suburb.

Both “Pictures from Home” and “The Valley” probe the narrative possibilities and limitations of photography, and the longing summoned by a presiding American Dream. In “Homeland,” the series Larry completed soon before he died, in 2009, he once again returned to the California suburbs, this time to explore a different side of the land of opportunity. Larry hired immigrant laborers who assembled every morning in strip-mall parking lots for daily jobs in construction. He employed them as photographic models in a variety of staged activities set against the backdrop of the “promised land.” These workers had come to the United States not to make a home for themselves but to make enough money to send back home to their families in Mexico or Central America. In Larry’s own words, “the resulting dramas are small and mundane in nature: carrying food to a potluck, stringing lights on a tree, or walking to a waiting car. They are routines and rituals related to place and domesticity, alluding to the poignancy of displacement and the longing for home.”

Larry and his wife, Kelly, lived in Marin County at the very end of a half-mile-long boardwalk, past an array of idiosyncratic houses. Their house—spare and unique, but elegant and comfortable—seemed to float on water. In the last years of his life, Larry’s studio was next door; when he worked, he could look out at the fortress of San Quentin prison, on the other side of the Bay, or across the open marshlands, with their egrets and wrens, to a distant view of the San Francisco skyline. Larry’s photographs possess a quality of hard-edged California light, heightened color, optical precision, and, often, domestic familiarity made more fascinating by the power of his imagination. Whenever I walked down the boardwalk and entered his house, I was reminded of the light in his pictures; this is where he honed his precision-cut insight. The home he created with Kelly in no way resembled the suburban theatre of his childhood, investigated in his many bodies of work; it was the home he had always wanted.

This piece was drawn from “Larry Sultan: Here and Home,” which was published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and DelMonico Books / Prestel in 2014. “Here and Home,” a retrospective of Sultan’s work, opens at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on April 15th.