Track Mangoes

Larry Sultan
“Practicing Golf Swing” 1986
From Pictures from Home

Irving Sultan: …That sounds good but it’s a load of crap. If anything, the pictures show how strained and artificial the situation was that you set up.

Larry Sultan was born in New York in 1946, but grew up in Los Angeles – an environment that much of his photographic work would later explore. He attended the University of California at Santa Barbara and received a BA in political science in 1968, and received a MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1973. He currently teaches at California College of the Arts as a professor of Fine Arts and Photography. Sultan has published several books, notably The Valley (2004), and Pictures from Home (1992) a series of photographs of his parents Irving and Jean Sultan, mixed with home video stills, old family photographs and text. For this project Sultan photographed his parents for over a decade.

When Sultan first conceived of a project centered on his family in the early 80s, it was in the context of resurgent conservatism and the Reagan presidency. Defensive of the traditional patriarchal family structure and trumpeting “pro-family” values, the rhetoric of the New Right had risen to a new level of prominence with the election of its figurehead Ronald Reagan. Success and middle class affluence (typified by the growth of suburbia) had become the ideal in postwar America, but by the 80s faith in American exceptionalism and continuous economic growth had been shaken – the fantasies and facades of American suburbia had begun to unravel.

Larry Sultan: Sure, it was a charade, but I’m talking about how the image is read rather than what literally was going on when it was made. There’s a difference. Don’t you think that a fiction can suggest a truth?

Sultan sought to challenge these established mythologies of family and success and examine the deterioration of this representation of American life. He chose to scrutinize the complexities of our success-driven culture through an in depth study of his own family. In the 60s and 70s his father, Irving Sultan, personified the American Dream: he was a handsome, successful Vice President of the Schick Safety Razor Company. However, when he began working on Pictures from Home, his father had just been forced into an early retirement. Sultan was interested in exploring what happens when major corporations cast of old employees and specifically how his father dealt with from going from being a successful business executive to a powerless retiree.

New York Times art critic Charles Hagen called Sultan’s work in Pictures from Home “post-modern snapshots,” because they “combine intimacy with an implicit social analysis.” Beginning from a sociological angle, Sultan’s project evolved into something much more personal, a self-conscious family portrait that explores familial representation, identities, and power dynamics. In examining Sultan’s photograph of his father, “Practicing Golf Swing,” along with the text placed in conjunction with it, these nuanced issue are thrown into sharp focus.

The golf club suspended in the air imitates the antennae of the television set just as the plush green carpet mimics the grass outside. Both Irving and the woman on TV look down, each caught in the middle of doing something – swinging the club and orating respectively. The translucent curtains function in two ways – creating the impression of being in a studio, and consequently drawing attention to the photographic process, and secondarily providing an obscured, mediated link to the outside world, a function echoed by the presence of the television set. The layers of mimicry and illusion unsettle the viewer, drawing attention to the superficiality of this situation. But then the voice of Irving Sultan interjects and shatters our interpretation; the subject speaks! He says to his son, “I’m sure you had very high-minded interests in the image and the implications of swinging a club with the television on and the curtains drawn, but for me the picture is pure description.”

Irving: Maybe, but whose truth is it? It’s your picture but my image…

Sultan considers this series to be a collaboration with his parents. He deliberately includes challenging conversations about the photographs themselves and the process of photographing. The presence of his parents’ voices throughout Pictures from Home subverts Sultan’s own conceptions of the images and effectively questions the implicit documentary truth of his photographs. These interjections disrupt the photographer’s authority – and it is precisely this multiplicity of both agency and truth that attracted me to Sultan’s work to begin with. There is a dialogue between the text and the images: Sultan presents his melancholy view of suburbia, and his father questions that representation. There is an ebb and flow between Sultan’s constructed reality and the personal reality of his father. We know some photographs are posed, but we also know that these images are based on actuality. “Don’t you think a fiction can suggest a truth?” Sultan asks his father in the book. But his father is more concerned with whose truth his son is portraying.

Larry: There are no clear lines – I don’t know where you stop and I start. And it’s crossed my mind that perhaps I’m out to justify my own life, my choices, by questioning yours. Perhaps I’m an average old wound.

These considerations are unavoidable precisely because of the nature of the photographer’s relationship to the subject. The act of photographing one’s own family is distinct from photographing a stranger or a friend because of the photographer’s positionality. When Tom Bamberger curated the show “Blood Relatives” at the Milwaukee Art Museum, he said of familial photography:

To photograph family is to be held accountable; to photograph family is to have much more at stake… What is maddening about parents and children is they can never finally distinguish themselves completely from one another. There is a continuity of self that extends across the boundaries we usually reserve to define our individuality.