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Untitled (Mom wearing beret)

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Untitled (Mom wearing beret)
Photograph

1984
17 x 22 in. (43.18 x 55.88 cm)

Larry Sultan (New York, New York, 1946 - 2009, Greenbrae, California) Primary

Object Type: Photograph

Medium and Support: Film still on paper

Credit Line: Museum purchase with funds contributed by the Council of 100.

Accession Number: 1996.19.02

Exhibition

Degrees of Separation: Contemporary Photography from the Permanent Collection, July 22, 2010 - March 13, 2011, New Wing, Second Floor, North Gallery, San José Museum of Art.

Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection, July 30, 2007 - September 9, 2007, San José Museum of Art.

Is the Medium the Message?: Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection, March 2, 2002 - June 2, 2002, New Wing, Metro A, Skylight and South Galleries, Second Floor, San José Museum of Art.

Collection Highlights, November 2, 2002 - September 12, 2004, New Wing, Gibson Family Gallery and Plaza Gallery, First Floor, San José Museum of Art.

Into the 21st Century: Selections from the Permanent Collection, May 22 -September 12, 1999, Second floor, New Wing, San José Museum of Art.

SJMA Label Text

Degrees of Separation: Contemporary Photography from the Permanent Collection (2010-2011)

Larry Sultan assembled old family photographs and still images from his family’s home movies to add a sense of family history to this installation. He combined these pre-existing images with more recent photographs of his parents to create something of a biography. It begins with his parents in their 20s, filled with dreams for the future, and traces the couple into their late 70s, when his father was forced into retirement from a career in business. Sultan used his own family to demonstrate that perfect families exist only in mass-media images and that real life is far more complex.

Collection Highlights (2002-2004)

Larry Sultan’s narrative series Pictures from Home examines the deceptive qualities of the medium of photography. From corny family snapshots to slick advertising images, Sultan asserts that photography can be used to build up false expectations over a lifetime, ultimately resulting in profound disappointment. Sultan expresses this idea through a ten-year photographic project focusing on his father, documenting the frustrations and pressures of an aging executive forced into early retirement. His father’s situation affected familial relationships and his identity as a man. The American dream promised in glossy magazine images was essentially false advertising. That picture-perfect life was utterly unattainable.

Pillaging family photo albums and home movies, Sultan gathered images from his parent’s early life together, with all their youth, hopes, and dreams intact. At the same time, he photographed them in the present day, in moody psychologically charged compositions dramatizing their isolation from each other and emphasizing their age, as seen in “Mom posing by green wall and Dad watching TV.” With this contemporary image of an indifferent, alienated couple, he juxtaposed grids of faded and grainy portrait enlargements from distant, happier times. The configuration reads like a storyboard of a lifelong relationship -–from the youthful optimism for the future, to the twilight of regrets and broken dreams.

However, as Sultan’s thesis asserts, photography is not truthful. He posed his parents in the present-day photographs and forbade them to smile. They contend that they do not see themselves in his images. He has imposed the emotional drama by directing them. The way his parents see it, and actually in fact, the story is completely manufactured – a work of fiction.

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