Larry Sultan's Humanizing Investigations
Someone is hiding behind his morning paper, the sun brushing it with a glowing light that obscures the shadow behind it. Two voluptuous blond women, completely nude, are sharing a laugh while reclining on a strange kitchen floor, preserved lemons in a jar on the counter above them. A man paddles a boat up a misty river. An orange is on fire.
California was always built well for the seemingly incongruous types of photographs Larry Sultan made, with its beautiful landscapes, brilliant natural light, proximity to the film industry, and conceptual broad-mindedness. But Sultan, a professorial man with a raspy voice, was a singular artist who put himself in many an uncomfortable situation all in order to patiently find the perfect image -- always questioning what it meant emotionally (and conceptually) to be a photographer. He is known for a selection of perfectly precise series, ranging from humanizing investigations into the porn industry to disquieting landscapes of his Bay Area surroundings, which are the subjects of his posthumous retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, organized by Rebecca Morse, associate curator in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department.
The show moves around in a loose reverse chronology -- though most of Sultan's series were done over the course of several years, which caused some overlap -- opening with the final series of Sultan's life, "Homeland" (2006-2009). With the look of formal landscapes, Sultan captured a fictional slice of the bucolic surrounding towns of San Francisco. He hired day laborers to act as characters in narrative staged photographs, but the images are left sparsely populated, giving them an almost post-apocalyptic eeriness. "When looking at this series, you think, 'That's impossible,'" explains Morse. "The way the foreshortening happens or the perspective. It's hard for your eye to see, but it creates an uncertainty and subtle dystopia."
The show slides directly into the revelation of the show, a series called "Pictures from Home" (1983-1992). In it, Sultan almost obsessively photographs his parents, capturing them in both brutally honest and heart-breakingly sweet moments. The series began when Sultan was sifting through a box of Super 8 videos, using a Moviola to isolate awkward, candid moments, and eventually the endeavor turned into a 10-year project realized as a book and an exhibition simultaneously in San Jose. The photographs of his father -- who was an aging, out-of-work former Schick salesman -- and his real estate broker mother, documented their diverging paths through moments that seem both complexly tense and domestically mundane. "His father would to him, 'God, you're still working on this? Haven't you gotten what you need?'" says Morse. "And Larry would be like, 'No.' There's an artistic struggle that happens when trying to create this body of work that's intimate and broad."
Sultan's biographical examination of his father's masculinity and malaise is crystal clear. Bits and pieces of paperwork detailing his father's firing from Schick for not accepting a relocation to the East Coast, and the subsequent images of his father's lax lifestyle of golfing, juxtapose with his mother's rise as a real estate agent. Almost anyone with a family will recognize images of familial tension, of struggle to find an identity and place, of resignation. You can see where a younger artist like Leigh Ledare, who photographed his mother's sexually liberal lifestyle, might have something to owe Sultan for exploring these raw portrayals of family.
From "Pictures from Home," the retrospective shifts to Sultan's most formal series, Swimmers (1978-1982), which are beautifully gauzy images taken with an underwater camera, mostly of legs. "He was looking at these Red Cross swimming manuals, and became interested in individuals learning how to swim," says Morse. "In the case of Sultan's images, these are blind people learning how to swim in swimming pools around San Francisco."
In the next gallery is "The Valley" (1997-2003), which was originally an assignment for Maxim Magazine that turned into a full-blown series for Sultan. In the series, Sultan visited 90 different pornography video shoots in the San Fernando Valley -- oftentimes with his wife Kelly coming along. "The actors and performers really liked these photographs and felt they could share them with their families in a way that they couldn't necessarily show the other work that they were doing," says Morse about the relationship Sultan built with the directors and porn actors.
Many of the shoots were done in rented suburban homes, and Sultan relished the access to these peculiar places, which were often very incongruent with the pornographic shoots. In one particular photo, a plastic baggie filled with sex toys rests on a bed in what seems to be a teenager's room. In another, Sultan photographs an active sex scene, but obscures the performers by shooting from behind a shrub. "The porn is minimized, but it's not totally avoided," Morse says.
The show then touches on commissioned editorial work Sultan made from 1993-2009, images that, looking at them in a gallery context, might look very strange in the pages of a magazine. An image of Paris Hilton looking at her phone on a bed in Sultan's childhood home shows that Sultan loved to play with the idea of personal and private being mixed with very public imagery. "His mother knew the owners, because this was the first house that she sold as a real estate agent," says Morse. "The new owners were still living in it, so they were able to rent it back. The magazine editors loved him, because he was an artist and would take these situations seriously and personally. For Sultan, it was creatively stimulating."
The show closes with a gallery full of works from Sultan's ongoing 27-year collaboration with artist Mike Mandel. An artist book they made called "How to Read Music in One Evening" (1974), a reproduction of one of the 15 billboards the duo made and displayed around San Francisco called "Oranges on Fire" (1975), and the duo's most famous work "Evidence" (1975-1977). "Evidence" is a series of found photographs, which was born from a chance encounter with NASA's photographic archives. These strange images showed the scientific process of experiments, which often, out of context, produced hilarious results. Obsessed with these pictures, Sultan and Mandel created a fake company called Clatworthy Colorvues, secured an NEA grant, and sent out requests to troll the archives from their new letterhead.
The Environmental Protection Agency, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and several other scientific organizations complied -- Sultan and Mandel claim they went through two million images in the compiling of the piece -- allowing Evidence to become a broad exploration of appropriation and humor. "He's investigating ways of building a narrative," says Morse. "It's not about a singular image; it's about the story they end up telling. There's something about the ridiculousness of that time. They're supposed to be scientific--they're supposed to be about truths. They're documented for that purpose, and yet they're so hilarious. The NEA grant said that they were looking at how men and machines interact. That's ultimately what they pulled out."
The retrospective expands onto the streets of Los Angeles, as LACMA has recreated the "Oranges on Fire" billboard and placed it in 15 locations throughout the city. It completes a precise picture of an artist that didn't quite get his due while he was alive. Sultan's work is quintessentially Californian -- conceptually clever, lushly light-filled, and brilliantly imaginative -- and the show shines a filtered afternoon light on his life.
"Larry Sultan: Here and Home" is on view through March 8, 2015.
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