Pictures from Home by Larry Sultan

Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings by Larry Sultan is also available here

First published in 1992 to wide acclaim, Pictures From Home is Larry Sultan’s sustained return to his parents—and to the charged intimacy of family life. Over the course of the 1980s, Sultan periodically traveled back to Southern California, building a decade-long sequence that shifts between forms and tones. Contemporary photographs sit alongside Super-8 film stills from home movies, fragments of conversation, Sultan’s own writing, and personal ephemera. The result is a narrative collage in which the line between documentary and staging grows increasingly uncertain. At the same time, the usual distance between photographer and subject gives way to a rare exchange of dialogue and emotion, making this work uniquely direct.

This MACK edition significantly expands the original book’s page count and brings its many voices—textual and visual—into sharper focus. Emphasising the cinematic movement of the family’s home videos, the Super-8 stills have been newly digitised and enlarged, with select sequences running full-bleed across double-page spreads. Sultan’s photographs of his parents going about daily life—set against the familiar backdrop of the Ronald Reagan-era American dream—are also supplemented with previously unpublished images. Most importantly, the book reaffirms Sultan as the oft-hailed “King of Colour Photography.”

“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.” – Larry Sultan