My tutor suggested I research two photographers in particular who have focused on their own families, Sally Mann, whom I looked at and discussed earlier in the course (here and here) and Larry Sultan, along with an exhibition called Presumed Innocence curated by Rachel Rosenfeld Lafo.
This post is about Larry Sultan's work which I found extremely moving and emotional.
Larry Sultan (1946 - 2009)grew up in American suburbia and returned there during the 80s when he photographed his mother and father, post-retirement, over a 10 year period calling the work Pictures from Home. He also photographed the porn industry in The Valley, working in similar suburban houses to his parents' in the same area, creating two contrasting strands of a story within the same setting. Larry Sultan worked extensively up to his death in 2009 photographing alone, in collaboration and for editorial. The blurb on his website states:
"Larry Sultan’s work has been exhibited and published widely and is
included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the
Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum
of American Art, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, and the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, where he was also recognized with the Bay Area
Treasure Award in 2005. Sultan served as a Distinguished Professor of
Photography at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Born in
Brooklyn, New York in 1946, Larry Sultan passed away at his home in
Greenbrae, California in 2009."
I cannot look at the images of his family without weeping. They are so moving and emotional when looked at as a series because the tenderness, respect and feeling which pours out of them is raw, honest and extraordinarily real. Larry Sultan says in an interview during an episode of The Genius of Photography that he specifically didn't want his father to smile which was very uncomfortable for Mr. Sultan senior. He wondered what was being projected onto him, he says, if he could not smile. ( The urge to see family photographs as something where everyone is smiling and happy is a very powerful one that is learned early. My own 2 year old picked up one of my cameras this morning, held it up to his eye and said 'cheese' which is bizarre because that isn't what I do - but he must have seen it somewhere. When I take photos of families the parents are often most interested in the smiley ones. We generally want our family snaps to portray a happy version of ourselves.)
These are not happy, holiday snaps or snaps of any description (unlike Richard Billingham's disturbing 'snaps' of his alcoholic father which were processed at Snappy Snaps (or something along those lines)). The photographs are mostly posed and Larry Sultan gives a lot of direction about where and how his subjects should sit or stand. However, he admits that these images are not about subjects in the traditional sense as he too, the photographer, is a subject in these photographs. "It's about Us," he tells the interviewer.
What I see in this work is a story about a family that includes the mythology that all families carry around in order to remember, to make sense, to hold themselves together, but it also tells the story of a family that have had to deal with the familial wars and battles that take place in all families one way or another. You can see the wounds - the frustrations, sorrow, anger, regrets: you can see it in the way the mother looks at her son or how she might look at her husband, or how the father looks at his son taking the pictures. What is so striking though is that this is a family that have been through these very human conflicts and come out the other side. There is evidence of deep knowledge from each about the others' less 'smiley' aspects, and an acceptance too. They each know that the other is a real human being. There are no pedestals or fantasies taking up the space. This is a family who have reached some level of peace with each-other and I think you see that happening within the photographs, perhaps through the act of taking them over that 10 year period.
What a wonderful thing for those parents to have done - in light of the fact that their son did not go down the expected route of 'corporate' career but chose an artistic one and quite a difficult artistic genre at that - to support their son's art by becoming part of it. And he seems to have responded to their generosity and understanding by being incredibly respectful and tender but still managing to create truly moving, non-sentimental images. For me, the love that the pictures communicate is remarkable. And they just make me cry each time I look at them.
Larry Sultan's work can be viewed here.
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