Published: December 14, 2009
Larry Sultan, a highly influential California photographer whose 1977
collaboration, “Evidence” — a book made up solely of pictures culled
from vast industrial and government archives — became a watershed in
the history of art photography, died on Sunday at his home in
Greenbrae, Calif. He was 63.
The cause was cancer, said his wife, Katherine, who is known as Kelly.
In the mid 1970s using a grant and a letter of introduction from the National Endowment for the Arts,
Mr. Sultan and Mike Mandel, who had met as students at the San
Francisco Art Institute, somehow managed to persuade several large
companies, agencies and research institutions like the Bechtel Corporation, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the San Jose Police Department and the United States Department of the Interior to let them rummage through their documentary photo files.
Highly
influenced by the West Coast brand of Conceptualism then percolating
out of places like the California Institute of the Arts, both men were
interested, as Mr. Mandel later said, in exploring photography as “more
than just the modernist practice of fine-tuning your style and way of
seeing.” The pictures they chose from the archives, out of the hundreds
of thousands they examined, were a strange, stark, sometimes disturbing
vision of a late-industrial world: a space-suited figure sprawled face
down on a carpeted floor; a car consumed in flames; a man holding up a
tangle of weeds like a trophy; a shaved monkey being held down by a
gloved hand.
Some of the images seemed to have been picked for
their uncanny resemblance to installation art being made at the time.
But the 59 photos published, with no captions to explain what they
showed or where they came from, pursued a much broader, Duchampian
agenda of harnessing found photographs for the purposes of art while
using them as a way to examine the society that produced them. The
critic Kenneth Baker of The San Francisco Chronicle
wrote that the project demonstrated brilliantly the degree to which “we
have no calculus to unravel relations between what a picture shows and
what it explains.”
Along with other artwork using vernacular
photographs, like that of Michael Lesy in his book “Wisconsin Death
Trip” and of Richard Prince, the project, first shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
opened broad new avenues for photography that have since been explored
by major museums and by artists like Christian Boltanski and Carrie Mae
Weems.
Born in Brooklyn, Mr. Sultan was raised mostly in Los
Angeles, where his family moved when he was an infant and where his
father worked as a traveling salesman and later as a vice president for
the Schick Safety Razor Company.
Not initially interested in photography, Mr. Sultan studied political science at the University of California at Santa Barbara
and later earned a master’s degree in fine arts from the San Francisco
Art Institute. Before he and Mr. Mandel began working on “Evidence,”
they collaborated on another project in which they bought space on
billboards around Los Angeles and posted traffic-slowing Dada-esque
messages. One bore the announcement “Oranges on Fire,” and showed two
cartoonish arms holding a bunch of flaming oranges.
For more than
a decade beginning in the early 1980s, Mr. Sultan, who became a
professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco,
worked on a project about his mother and his father, who had been
forced into early retirement. Using stills from home movies along with
lush, colored-saturated pictures he took of his parents, the resulting
book, “Pictures From Home,” was a deeply personal document but one that
continued Mr. Sultan’s lifelong mission of exploring photography’s
fictions.
Mr. Sultan’s father, Irving, speaking of a picture of
himself in a suit sitting on the edge of a bed with a vacant stare on
his face, related how his son had instructed him not to smile and had
created a portrait that the elder Mr. Sultan felt was much more about
the photographer than the photographed.
“ ‘Any time you show that
picture,’ ” Mr. Sultan said his father told him, “‘you tell people that
that’s not me sitting on the bed looking all dressed up and nowhere to
go, depressed. That’s you sitting on the bed, and I am happy to help
you with the project, but let’s get things straight here.’ ” His
parents died not long after the work was completed.
In addition
to his wife, Mr. Sultan is survived by two sons, Max and Will, both of
Greenbrae; and two brothers, Michael, of Pacific Palisades, Calif., and
Kenneth, of Santa Barbara.
In the 1990s, Mr. Sultan began to
photograph in the San Fernando Valley, near when he went to high
school, shooting suburban homes that were being rented as sets for
pornographic movies. Sandra S. Phillips, the photography curator at the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, said that while the work, called
“The Valley,” was “nominally about the industry of adult sexual
fantasy, the true subject of Sultan’s pictures is how photography is
used in the construction of that fantasy.”
Writing in LA Weekly
about the work in 2004, Mr. Sultan observed of one particular set: “The
furnishings and objects in the house, which have been carefully
arranged, become estranged from their intended function. The roll of
paper towels on the coffee table, the bed linens in a pile by the door,
the shoes under the bed are transformed into props or the residue of
unseen but very imaginable actions. Even the piece of half-eaten pie on
the kitchen counter arouses suspicion.”
