Exhibition Review: Larry Sultan | Pictures From Home

Larry Sultan. Reading in Bed, from the series Pictures from Home, 1988. Archival pigment print. Edition of 10 30 x 40 inches. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery.

Writer: Sophie Mulgrew

Editor: Robyn Hager

Photo: Haley Winchell

Larry Sultan’s photo collection Pictures from Home is prolific. Sultan’s images have shown widely in galleries and museums, been turned into a twice-published book, and are now being realized on stage for the first time as a Broadway play. It is no surprise the images have garnered such wide interest and recognition; they are deeply intimate, compositionally thoughtful, and texturally stunning. New Yorkers should not miss the chance to see the photographs in-person at the Yancey Richardson gallery in Chelsea, where they’ll be showing until April 8th. 

Larry Sultan. Empty Pool, from the series Pictures from Home, 1991. Archival pigment print. Edition of 10 30 x 40 inches. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery.

Larry Sultan. Fixing the Vacuum, from the series Pictures from Home, 1991. Archival pigment print. Edition of 6 40 x 50 inches. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery.

Larry Sultan. Business Page, from the series Pictures from Home, 1985. Archival pigment print. Edition of 6 40 x 50 inches. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery.

Pictures from Home is a collection of photographs taken of Sultan’s parents in and around their home in Los Angeles in the 1980s. The images depict the couple partaking in various everyday acts that make up life: fixing the vacuum, reading in bed, going for a dip in the pool. Though the actions themselves may seem mundane, they take on a reverent quality in Sultan’s images. This is partly to do with Sultan’s intense interest in and mastery over the use of light. In “business page” light from a dining room shines on the back of a sepia toned newspaper, illuminating within its beam the reader’s profile. In “Los Angeles, early evening” the outside of a house darkens with the coming night, in contrast with the warm yellow window alight inside. In all of the images, Sultan renders light in a way that heightens the captured moment’s significance. The photographs feel slightly surreal, as if the viewer has been thrust into a retro-suited day dream.

Larry Sultan. Los Angeles, Early Evening, from the series Pictures from Home, 1986. Archival pigment print. Edition of 6 40 x 50 inches. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery.

Larry Sultan. Dad on Bed, from the series Pictures from Home, 1984. Archival pigment print. Edition of 10 40 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery.

 Indeed, this was part of Sultan’s goal. He states that through the collection, he “wanted to measure how a life was lived against how a life was dreamed.” This idea presents itself in both the visual makeup of the photos and also the moments they contain. Sultan’s parents are older, and are shown doing - more or less - nothing in particular; practicing a golf swing in the living room, watching tv, admiring a sunset. Sultan asks the viewer to consider what becomes of one’s dreams when the majority of life has already been lived. Are the images sad? Hopeful? Objective? It’s hard to say. Perhaps what the viewer feels in the images is more a reflection of their own dreams for their life than of some narrative crafted by Sultan.  

Larry Sultan. icing Golf Swing, from the series Pictures from Home, 1986. Archival pigment print. 40 x 50 inches. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery.

Larry Sultan. Dad with Raft, from the series Pictures from Home, 1987. Archival pigment print. Edition of 6 40 x 50 inches. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery.

The photographs are both staged and unstaged, carefully arranged and spontaneously captured. Sultan gives light to the rhythms and peculiarities of domestic suburban life. He humanizes his subjects without co-opting their authenticity. Pictures from Home is a series of photographs that come together to create a larger portrait; one that presents life as a simple, ever-unrealized dreamscape. Sultan asserts that even the most familiar subjects – one’s family, childhood home, daily activities– can be rendered in new and beautiful ways.  

Larry Sultan. My Mother Posing, from the series Pictures from Home, 1984. Archival pigment print. Edition of 6 40 x 50 inches. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery.

Larry Sultan. Sunset, from the series Pictures from Home, 1989. Archival pigment print. Edition of 10 30 x 40 inches. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery.