When 36-year old Larry Sultan visited his parents in San Fernando Valley in 1982, he discovered a trove of home movies taken over the course of 20 years. Inspired by the films, Sultan began working on a series of photographs featuring his own parents that addresses themes of aging (both of his parents and his own), familial conflict, gender roles, and the often blurred lines between public and private lives.
Published in 1992, Pictures from Home comprises photographs primarily taken inside or around his family's midcentury home in Southern California. The distinctively decorated ranch-style house acts as a vibrant backdrop for Sultan’s years-long project. The electric color scheme, shag carpeting, upholstery, and gold-accented wallpaper became a ready-made theater in which Sultan could work during frequent visits. Sultan embraced rather than downplayed his parents' idiosyncratic decorating scheme, capitalizing on the saturated colors of the interior design, perfectly suited for the brilliant range of chromogenic photography.
'All day long I've been scavenging, poking around in rooms and closets, peering at their things, studying them. I arrange my rolls of exposed film into long rows and count and recount them as if they were loot. There are twenty-eight. What drives me to continue this work is difficult to name. It has more to do with love than with sociology, with being a subject in the drama rather than a witness. And in the odd and jumbled process of working, everything shifts; the boundaries blur, my distance slips, the arrogance and illusion of immunity falters. I wake up in the middle of the night, stunned and anguished. These are my parents. From that simple fact, everything follows. I realize that beyond the rolls of film and the few good pictures, the demands of my project and my confusion about its meaning, is the wish to take photography literally. To stop t.mes . I want my parents to live forever.'
While Sultan occasionally made candid photographs of his parents, most of the works from Pictures from Home are at least partially staged. Sultan’s mother and father are often depicted as nearly statue-like, despite being pictured while engaging in kinetic activities. In the present image, Sultan’s father is shown at the peak moment of tension while swinging a golf club. Despite his age, he retains physical strength and form, depicted as motionless as a Greek sculpture.
In Pictures from Home, Sultan’s photographs are interspersed with home movie stills and transcribed interviews with his parents. Martin Parr described it as ‘one of the most significant American photobooks of the 1990s.’ (The Photobook. A History, Vol. II, p. 302) More than 30 years later, Pictures From Home recently inspired a stage adaptation. The play, written by Sharr White in 2022, opened on Broadway in January 2023.