Larry Sultan
Artist Spotlight
Larry Sultan, Poet of the Ordinary
There are photographs that document the world, and then there are photographs that reveal it. Larry Sultan belonged firmly to the second category. When the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art mounted a major retrospective of his work, audiences encountered something rare: images that felt simultaneously like confessions, fictions, and memories, all at once. Sultan had a gift for finding the trembling emotional charge inside the most familiar American scenes, and that gift has only grown more luminous in the years since his death in 2009 at the age of sixty three. Sultan was born in Brooklyn in… Continue reading
Artists in conversation
Nan Goldin
Like Sultan, Goldin creates deeply intimate photographic explorations of family, domesticity, and personal relationships that blur the line between documentary and constructed narrative.
Joel Sternfeld
Sternfeld shares Sultan's use of large format color photography to examine American suburban and domestic landscapes with a simultaneously seductive and unsettling psychological undertone.
Tina Barney
Barney similarly uses staged yet candid color photography to examine family life and domestic interiors, probing questions of identity, class, and the performance of everyday life.
Artists who inspired them
Robert Frank
Frank's candid and psychologically charged documentary approach to American life and identity was a foundational influence on Sultan's method of probing beneath the surface of everyday existence.
Garry Winogrand
Winogrand's street photography tradition and his examination of postwar American social life shaped Sultan's interest in capturing the tensions and contradictions of American culture.
Ed Ruscha
Ruscha's conceptual photographic explorations of Southern California's vernacular landscape and suburban environment directly informed Sultan's own engagement with the San Fernando Valley as a site of cultural inquiry.
Artists they inspired
Taryn Simon
Simon's practice of combining photographs with text and archival documents to construct layered narratives about identity and institutional systems echoes Sultan's pioneering hybrid approach in Pictures from Home.
Justine Kurland
Kurland's color photographic investigations of American landscapes and domestic communities reflect Sultan's influence in merging staged and documentary modes to examine social and familial mythologies.