Larry Sultan: Here and Home

This major retrospective examines the work and career of Larry Sultan (American, 1946–2009), an internationally renowned photographer with deep ties to the Bay Area as both an artist and an educator. Sultan’s often intensely personal images—many drawn from his own family’s history—blend documentary and staged elements in their explorations of storytelling, family, and domesticity.

Larry Sultan: Here and Home explores the artist’s 35-year career through more than 200 photographs, a billboard created with conceptual artist and frequent collaborator Mike Mandel, a film, and “Study Hall”— a room offering a unique glimpse into Sultan’s exploratory process.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Whether or not you go, Larry Sultan: Here and Home, is the first comprehensive overview of celebrated photographer Larry Sultan's work, and features work from every significant series, including Evidence (1977), the conceptual project with Mike Mandel, which broke ground by demonstrating how context and sequence directly influence our interpretation of photographs; Pictures from Home (1982-92), a personal exploration of family and domesticity challenging larger notions of representation through use of contemporary pictures of Sultan's parents contrasted with movie stills from his childhood; The Valley (1998-2003), a deliberate inquiry into the subversion of the suburban homes commonly used by the porn industry as sets for films; and Homeland (2006-09), Sultan's most recent body of work, depicting day laborers posed in evocative California settings suggesting both dislocation and longing. Also featured are additional early collaborative works with Mandel, selected later career editorial work, and writings by and interviews with Sultan elucidating his creative process.

Larry Sultan: Here and Home