Larry Sultan 1946-2009

Larry Sultan's work is most familiar to me from books: Evidence, Pictures from Home, and The Valley. The work also exists as gallery prints & has been used in magazines spreads. My personal attachment is to the books & the experience such a form offers: private, on my own time.

Evidence, made with Mike Mandel, is a collection of industrial photographs, which as a collection, leads to a kind of non-sense of imagery. Nothing relates, nothing really means anything, but the viewer is face-to-face with "evidence" of something somehow. There is a dry humor in the residue of corporate imagery, it's utter obscurity & obsolescence, but it is also a kind of psychic downward spiral, a tension between the kitsch of execution & a horror of banality.

Unlike a lot of work which uses vernacular imagery often as a kind of nostalgia, or a collection used to codify forms, Evidence uses imagery which traffics between the institutional & the ridiculous - as archaeology, the imagery is ultimately embarrassing in its weirdness, its cryptic passages between intention & effect.

There is an agitational quality to Sultan's work, an unrest, a meta-critique of the uses of photography which is most apparent in Evidence, in which the imagery is found, but which also informs the 2 long-term projects, Pictures from Home, which deals with the suburban culture of Sultan's parents, and The Valley, which is "behind the scenes" of the adult film industry.

Pictures from Home uses both Sultan's color photographs of his parents, living on the edge of a golf course, in southern CA, along with frame enlargements of home movies made by Sultan's father. The home movies are predictably bucolic & idealized - vacations, fun, high points. Sultan's photographs seem much darker in comparison, although in extremely lush color, in the brilliant SoCal light, in their acute focus & detail (contra the pictorial inexactitude of the home movies). Sultan's parents are used as kind of a test-case of post WWII prosperity & its retirement, figures placed in an artificial new world of synthetics, hovering in an ahistorical constant present. Sultan's parents become the post WWII nuclear family, severed from kith & kin, adrift in a sea of commodities.

In comparison, the images in The Valley seem the most illustrative, juxtaposed with both Evidence & Pictures from Home. The images can be read easily in either magazine or on a gallery wall: the behind-the-scenes of the adult film industry, on location in rented McMansions in the San Fernando Valley. The images concentrate on the absolute clutter of the houses as sites of filmmaking, in terms of the logistics of the set-ups as well as everything that is necessary to sustain the shoot. Also the images deal with the hours of waiting behind any film project - hours of tedium distinguishing the work involved. While it has some of the romantic appeal of a film like Boogie Nights& a general fascination with the adult film industry in our culture (a Puritanical vision of carnality at its most commodified, i.e. sensible form), the real subject seems to be the conformity & dullness of work, any work. The hideous McMansions of the Valley photograph extremely well: settings of baroque vulgarity, impersonal except for the particularities of bad taste from house to house, & even then nothing is ever unique or outstanding. Everything is prefabricated, mass produced, & strangely empty. The models for the films reiterate the alienation of the architecture & decor in their utter displacement from it. Everything looks kind of awful & inexplicably expensive.

Larry Sultan's photographs for The Valley, printed large, fit comfortably in art galleries, wherein large color photographs are a kind of contemporary salon painting. Akin to PL DiCorcia's images of pole dancers, or the more obscure images of porn sets done by Jeff Burton, which seem more about distraction & daydreaming on the job (Burton was also working for various companies). Still, Sultan's images have a kind of distancing & self-consciousness which keeps them from being pure commodity. The images are rehearsals for images, attempts, auditions, lapses, distractions. The models look mechanical & bored. The theme of scientific management seen in the images of Evidence is sublimated but constant throughout The Valley.

From Evidence to The Valley: dealing w/ corporate imagery, the family, suburbia & sex. Such an engaged & challenging use of the camera & the photograph.

Bill Wood's Business

Bill Wood's Business by Marvin Heiferman & Diane Keaton is culled from an archive of 4x5 black-&-white negatves of commercial work done by Bill Wood, a photographer & camera store owner in downtown Dallas, working from 1937-1973. There are a total of 20,000 negatives in the archive which was originally saved by the archivist Rick Prelinger, which was later owned by Diane Keaton, & is now a gift to the International Center of Photography. Heiferman & Keaton have collaborated on books of industrial images in the past such as Mr. Salesman; & Keaton is also a photographer. Her book, Reservations, is one of my treasured possessions - & when I go to Miami Beach I look in vain for what is now a lost world of Morris Lapidus & such designs, such as those seen in her images.

Bill Wood's photographs, all done commercially, are a fascinating insight into the social fabric of post WWII USA. An entrepreneur, a public figure, Bill Wood himself emerges as a resolutely cheerful, social figure - a Mason, a lodge member, his name emblazoned on his car & in neon over his store. If anything this shows us an aspect of photography as a kind of thread to the social fabric - from showroom displays to prizewinners to re-enactments of accidents to new buildings & streets - the photograph as a kind of proof & reinforcement of social values emerges, even when we can no longer identify directly what the uses of the images. Both familiar & strange, there is some uncanniness to the images, which are nevertheless deliriously cheerful & matter-of-fact. Lists of the subjects do not do the images justice. I am struck by their constant "can-do" spirit, their euphoric faith in the "new" world of the modern city & suburb, product & display.

As a collection, the book reminds me of Evidence, the book by Mike Mandel & Larry Sultan. Evidence utilizes the obsolescence of the images - that they have lost function & sense - to create a new narrative of images which become enigmatic in their lack of context, again utilizing their familiarity to lead us to a state of un-knowing. The Bill Wood photos do this with their eclectic subject matter(s), rendered as if all of one piece with the uniform clarity of film & flash, yet never revealing their "secret," if there actually is one. I am reminded of the worlds of my parents & their peers, their "new" world of subdivisions & products, from ready-to-wear clothes to frozen vegetables. Perhaps I am romanticizing this epoch, but I do believe they believed they had inherited a new world which was bountiful & extraordinary in the everyday - optimistic values not so apparent in our current world. If there is a "zeitgeist" to the ordinary, I believe it can be seen in this amazing archive of our once brave new world - we see what we have lost, or what is no longer available to us.