Larry Sultan

(American, 1946–2009)

Larry Sultan was an American photographer known for his use of images to create a discourse between fiction and documentary. The seminal photobook Pictures From Home (1992), achieved this difficult ambiguity through combining film stills from home movies, contemporary photographs of suburbia, and texts from his journal. “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,” he once explained. Born on July 13, 1946 in Brooklyn, NY, he grew up outside of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley region. He studied political science at UC Santa Barbara, and later received his MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. He became known in 1977 for Evidence, a highly influential book he made in collaboration with Mike Mandel backed by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. In the late 1990s, Sultan began a new project documenting suburban homes rented out as sets for pornographic movies in his hometown. Like his previous series, The Valley (2004), was regarded as being less about its subject matter and more a commentary on how images are used to construct fantasy. The artist died on December 13, 2009 in Greenbrae, CA. Today, his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, among others.