What do you think?
Rate this book
Larry Sultan: Here and Home
This first comprehensive overview of celebrated photographer Larry Sultan’s work accompanies a major retrospective and features work from every significant series, including Homeland, his most recent body of work. This first comprehensive overview of celebrated photographer Larry Sultan’s work accompanies a major retrospective and features work from every significant series, Evidence (1977), the conceptual project with Mike Mandel, which broke ground by demonstrating how context and sequence directly influence our interpretation of photographs; Pictures from Home (1982–92), a personal exploration of family and domesticity challenging larger notions of representation through use of contemporary pictures of Sultan’s parents contrasted with movie stills from his childhood; The Valley (1998–2003), a deliberate inquiry into the subversion of the suburban homes commonly used by the porn industry as sets for films; and Homeland (2006–09), Sultan’s most recent body of work, depicting day laborers posed in evocative California settings suggesting both dislocation and longing. Also featured are additional early collaborative works with Mandel, selected later career editorial work, and writings by and interviews with Sultan elucidating his creative process.
- GenresPhotographyArt
208 pages, Hardcover
First published November 25, 2014
2 people are currently reading
20 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 6, 2017
This exhibit, and a companion one focusing on the work of Sultan's collaborator, Mike Mandel, make clear that artists, like rock musicians, can sometimes bring out the best in each other through collaboration, their solo work showing that the partnership was more than the sum of its parts. Sultan and Mandel did some fascinating, rather groundbreaking, work together. Their solo careers pale in comparison. Sadly, these exhibits focus primarily on Sultan's and Mandel's solo works.
As young artists in the late '60s and '70s, Sultan and Mandel made significant contributions to the burgeoning conceptual art scene. They created very funny and startling images and messages on post-cards and billboards, smuggling their art into the public sphere. Their book, "Evidence" is rather brilliant. The partners investigated government and corporate files of experiments of varying sorts, finding strange photos and presenting them in a series without context or explanation, making the pictures all the more indecipherable. The resulting series/ collage is something like the visual equivalent of a great Firesign Theater record: hilarious, subtly rather sad, and indefinably terrifying. Similarly, Sultan and Mandel re-edited 8mm footage of NASA experiments into a cosmic comedy of errors: science is a clown that attempts to grasp the infinite. Knowledge itself seems lampooned.
Individually, the artists are far less impressive. Sultan was always a photographer's photographer. He has a great visual talent that sometimes fails to convey his intellectual ambitions. Mandel works with photography, but is very much a conceptual artist: the idea, if one wants to put it that way, trumps his actual image-making. Unfortunately, when not working with Sultan, Mandel's conceptions seem rather trite, and his imagery is utterly banal.
Sultan's photos are aesthetically beautiful. He has a bona-fide mastery of color. Unfortunately, his cycles fail to convey as much as it seems he would like them to. "Pictures From Home" combines old household photos from his childhood in his parents home in the San Fernando Valley with pictures taken by Sultan of his parents in old age. What Sultan conceived of as an investigation into the relationship between memory, bodily presentation, and identity, instead just seems, at least to me, like pretty pictures of old people in their home.
"The Valley", a series of pictures of porn shoots in domestic settings, seems characterized by a subtle prudishness. Sultan seems both turned on by, and disgusted at the fact that yes, real, regular human beings engage in sex work. I found this subject matter far less shocking, and also less interesting, than it seems the artist did.
The highlight of Sultan's solo work was "Homeland", pictures of Latino workers engaged in some kind of unnamed activity within the suburban sprawl of California. Such sprawl is often maligned, but, through Sultan's lens, it comes to seem almost Arcadian. Some of these photos are shockingly beautiful, and filled me with Cali pride.
If I found Sultan's solo work less than thrilling, I was far less enthusiastic with the exhibition detailing Mandel's solo work from the '70s. His most famous solo project was his Baseball card series, in which he photographed an impressive array of American photographers, both young and old, as baseball players, then turning the photos into actual, tradable packs of cards. The only thing that distinguishes the photos are the playful poses of the models. Mandel is, of course, telling us, "Photography is taken seriously as an art now, and celebrity photographers are like star-athletes!" This, and similar "conceptions" struck me as nothing but empty gimmicks.
In a particularly annoying series, Mandel sets a timer and then stands next to an unsuspecting person, their confused reactions the source of supposed hilarity. As the exhibit commentary notes, Mandel's self-depictions seem to presage the contemporary phenomena of selfies and photo-bombing. In this sense, perhaps, Mandel's solo work was, indeed, ahead of its time: it prefigured the narcissistic flotsam of this time.
As young artists in the late '60s and '70s, Sultan and Mandel made significant contributions to the burgeoning conceptual art scene. They created very funny and startling images and messages on post-cards and billboards, smuggling their art into the public sphere. Their book, "Evidence" is rather brilliant. The partners investigated government and corporate files of experiments of varying sorts, finding strange photos and presenting them in a series without context or explanation, making the pictures all the more indecipherable. The resulting series/ collage is something like the visual equivalent of a great Firesign Theater record: hilarious, subtly rather sad, and indefinably terrifying. Similarly, Sultan and Mandel re-edited 8mm footage of NASA experiments into a cosmic comedy of errors: science is a clown that attempts to grasp the infinite. Knowledge itself seems lampooned.
Individually, the artists are far less impressive. Sultan was always a photographer's photographer. He has a great visual talent that sometimes fails to convey his intellectual ambitions. Mandel works with photography, but is very much a conceptual artist: the idea, if one wants to put it that way, trumps his actual image-making. Unfortunately, when not working with Sultan, Mandel's conceptions seem rather trite, and his imagery is utterly banal.
Sultan's photos are aesthetically beautiful. He has a bona-fide mastery of color. Unfortunately, his cycles fail to convey as much as it seems he would like them to. "Pictures From Home" combines old household photos from his childhood in his parents home in the San Fernando Valley with pictures taken by Sultan of his parents in old age. What Sultan conceived of as an investigation into the relationship between memory, bodily presentation, and identity, instead just seems, at least to me, like pretty pictures of old people in their home.
"The Valley", a series of pictures of porn shoots in domestic settings, seems characterized by a subtle prudishness. Sultan seems both turned on by, and disgusted at the fact that yes, real, regular human beings engage in sex work. I found this subject matter far less shocking, and also less interesting, than it seems the artist did.
The highlight of Sultan's solo work was "Homeland", pictures of Latino workers engaged in some kind of unnamed activity within the suburban sprawl of California. Such sprawl is often maligned, but, through Sultan's lens, it comes to seem almost Arcadian. Some of these photos are shockingly beautiful, and filled me with Cali pride.
If I found Sultan's solo work less than thrilling, I was far less enthusiastic with the exhibition detailing Mandel's solo work from the '70s. His most famous solo project was his Baseball card series, in which he photographed an impressive array of American photographers, both young and old, as baseball players, then turning the photos into actual, tradable packs of cards. The only thing that distinguishes the photos are the playful poses of the models. Mandel is, of course, telling us, "Photography is taken seriously as an art now, and celebrity photographers are like star-athletes!" This, and similar "conceptions" struck me as nothing but empty gimmicks.
In a particularly annoying series, Mandel sets a timer and then stands next to an unsuspecting person, their confused reactions the source of supposed hilarity. As the exhibit commentary notes, Mandel's self-depictions seem to presage the contemporary phenomena of selfies and photo-bombing. In this sense, perhaps, Mandel's solo work was, indeed, ahead of its time: it prefigured the narcissistic flotsam of this time.
January 8, 2021
A good book encompassing all of Sultan's major work.
Contains a solid amount of pictures, as well as decent amount of writing about Larry and his workthat is actually worth reading.
Contains a solid amount of pictures, as well as decent amount of writing about Larry and his workthat is actually worth reading.
June 6, 2022
Love love love
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews