Pictures from Home, made by Larry Sultan between 1983 and 1992 around his parents’ lives in California’s San Fernando Valley and Palm Desert, examines his aging parents and the stories through which families construct and represent themselves. Its origins reach back to 1982, when Sultan began examining his family’s 8 mm home movies; he later isolated selected frames and enlarged them as photographs in the related Home Movie Stills, an archival body of work that became a point of departure for Pictures from Home. Set against postwar middle-class aspiration and Reagan-era “family values,” it places one household within broader questions of mobility, success, aging, work, and marriage, shaped by the Sultans’ move from Brooklyn to California and their later retirement.
Rather than treat family as a fixed social type, Sultan asks how lived experience compares with the life his parents imagined and performed. His new photographs of Jean and Irving developed alongside this earlier engagement with the family archive, presenting their contemporary lives in relation to the images through which the family had previously represented itself. Jean and Irving Sultan sometimes challenged his representations of them. The project consequently addresses memory, family self-representation, and the question of who has authority to define the meaning of a family photograph.
Across bedrooms, kitchens, pools, garages, offices, and cars, Sultan shows Jean and Irving Sultan posing, arguing, reading, repairing appliances, practicing golf, or resting. Chromogenic color renders saturated interiors, avocado greens, reflective surfaces, deep shadows, and domestic clutter. Some scenes appear carefully choreographed, with figures isolated by furniture, doorways, newspapers, or expanses of carpet, while others follow habitual activity. The resulting mood moves between tension, tenderness, awkwardness, and impending loss.
Sultan treated the suburban house as a stage while spending extended periods following his parents’ routines, moving between observed and directed situations. Working in color, he used the architecture and furnishings of the home to structure the images, often positioning figures within doorways, windows, areas of shadow, and expanses of domestic space. The resulting compositions make the interior environment an integral part of how his parents are represented.
The project entered public view before completion in MoMA's California Photography: Remaking Make-Believe in 1989, then appeared there again in Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort in 1991. Harry N. Abrams published the book with Sultan's 1992-93 San José Museum of Art exhibition, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art later presented it. It was revisited in Larry Sultan: Here and Home at LACMA, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and SFMOMA. Collections include MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
