Biography

Biography below from SJMA "Selections" publication, 2004.

Larry Sultan’s photographs aim to demythologize the lifestyle of the American suburbs. From the porch of his family’s first tract home to the golf course of his aging parents’ retirement community, Sultan combines old snapshots, vintage film footage, and recent photographic images to examine his changing attitudes towards middle-class culture. Convinced that the American Dream often meets its demise in the suburbs, Sultan set out “to measure how a life was lived against how a life was dreamed.”1 What he discovered was that his memories of home—most often mediated by photographs—did not always match the realities of his past.

Sultan’s parents first moved to California from Brooklyn, New York, in 1949 to pursue the “good life” away from the big city. The suburban lifestyle quickly consumed them: a brand-new ranch-style home in the San Fernando Valley, backyard barbecues, a swimming pool. Sultan’s father climbed the corporate ladder and his mother stayed home to raise her children. During the tumultuous 1960s, Sultan enrolled at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he studied political science and began to take photographs, “as a way of participating in those times—as a witness and a creator.”2 Photography eventually led him to the Bay Area, and he earned a M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1973.
Sultan first conceived of the Pictures from Home series in the early 1980s during a visit to his parents’ home in Los Angeles. His father had just been forced into early retirement and spent his days golfing, and his mother had recently become a successful real estate agent who was rarely at home. As they spent an evening watching old family movies together, Sultan began to speculate that the romantic image of life in the suburbs may have been a façade. “I have an enormous argument with their culture (perhaps it’s my culture as well),” Sultan admitted.3 For the next ten years, he gathered images from past and present to tell the story of his parents’ conventional life gone awry.

Sultan worked closely with his parents to stage hundreds of photographs in and around their home. In Mom Posing by Green Wall and Dad Watching TV (1984), Sultan’s mother stands before a bright green wall in her living room, her morose gaze directed at the camera. His father turns his back to her and is engrossed in a televised baseball game. Typically, this photograph is displayed alongside four film stills showing his parents as an optimistic and hopeful young couple. The contrast reveals the emotional distance that Sultan now senses between his parents. The artificial plants and flowers that decorate the couple’s home underscore their desire to maintain a positive outward appearance despite their underlying unhappiness.

Not surprisingly, Sultan’s parents disagree with their son’s less-than-glowing assessment of their lifestyle. Although they willingly participated in the planned photo shoots, Sultan’s father once told him, “for the most part that’s not me I recognize in those pictures.”4 The veracity of Sultan’s photograph, therefore, remains contested. Is his mother’s empty gaze wholly fabricated? Does his father’s turned back suggest genuine detachment? Or is this “documentary” photograph simply a part of Sultan’s elaborate fiction? Sultan responds by asking “Don’t you think that a fiction can suggest a truth?”5

By raising these questions, Sultan joins other photographers from his generation, including Sherrie Levine and Barbara Krueger, in the dialectic of photographic representation. Although the Pictures from Home series takes as its subject something very personal—Sultan’s own family—it also forces viewers to grapple with the widely held assumption that photographs always speak the truth. —A.W.

1. Larry Sultan, quoted in Catherine Liu, “Larry Sultan,” Bomb, spring 1990, 56.
2. Ibid., 52.
3. Ibid.
4. Irving Sultan, quoted in Larry Sultan, Pictures from Home (New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., 992), 114.
5. Larry Sultan, quoted in Pictures from Home, 114.

SJMA Label Text: Biography:
Born 1946, New York, New York
Lives in Greenbrae, California

Sultan moved with his family to Southern California in 1949. He studied political science at the UCLA and UC Santa Barbara in the late 1960s and began photographing the turbulent political and social events occurred at this time. In 1973 Sultan received an M.F.A. in photography from San Francisco Art Institute. He is a recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide. He is currently a professor of art at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

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