First published in 1992, Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home is an intriguing visual memoir that is also an exploration of the all-American family, both as a reality and a construct. Sultan began the project when Ronald Reagan was president and “the institution of the family was being used as an inspirational symbol by resurgent conservatives. I wanted to puncture this mythology of the family and to show what happens when we are driven by images of success. And I was willing to use my family to prove a point.”
Although that may have been the original motivation, the book is too personal and self-questioning to be anything other than a tortured labour of love, a way of seeing his parents – and himself – anew. Throughout, Sultan used family snapshots and stills from home movies alongside his own photographs of his parents, who, having retired to a desert community near Palm Springs, appear to be living through the final chapter of their own personal version of the American dream. Their expansive house and gardens are the setting for Sultan’s portraits, which, whether intimate or cinematic, are always artfully choreographed, as if reminding us that we are looking at a highly constructed narrative.
Pictures from Home is also a masterclass in merging images and text. Throughout, Sultan’s often painful reflections – on his upbringing, his parents, his photography, and the wisdom of this project – are undercut with his father’s more macho, matter-of-fact monologues on the same. The tension between the two is the classic generational tension between father and son; the one seeking affirmation of his work, the other baffled by it. “Every few months I visit, loaded down with camera gear and ideas for pictures,” writes Sultan. “It takes a day or two for most of these ideas to seem strained or foolish and then I’m left with cases of unexposed film and a feeling of desperation.”
Sultan, who died in 2009, is best known for Evidence (1977), a book of found photographs he curated with Mike Mandel, which is now regarded as one of the most influential photography titles of the past 50 years. Pictures from Home is also a book of evidence, albeit of a very different kind and one whose subtext is the particular tensions of photography: the tricky balancing act between critical distance and emotional engagement, between empathy and voyeurism.
Sultan describes sneaking into his mother’s bedroom and photographing her as she lay sleeping – “I was so apprehensive of waking her that I breathed in rhythm with her.” He photographs the underside of her foot, which he realises he has never seen before. In his furtive excitement, he wishes he could “photograph it again and again”. It is a strange, heightened interlude, made more so by the realisation that she was not really asleep – “We were co-conspirators. Just as I was secretly photographing, she was secretly awake. She felt me looking.”
Ultimately, as Sultan acknowledged, Pictures from Home is an impossible project. “I realise that beyond the rolls of film and the few good pictures,” he writes, “the demands of my project and my confusion about its meaning, is the wish to take photography literally. To stop time. I want my parents to live for ever.” In a way, he succeeded.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion