Artist: Larry Sultan

Yancey Richardson presents Homeland, an exhibition featuring photographs from Larry Sultan’s series of the same name and the third exhibition of his work with the gallery. In his expansive photographs of Latino day laborers set against the backdrop of a suburban California landscape, Sultan explores the liminal spaces between actions, the moments that exist as time passes. Though he borrows from the tradition of landscape painting, with its presumption of order through perspective, Sultan’s photographs emphasize the indeterminate and the ambiguous instead, revealing the sense of possibility that remains embedded in the act of waiting.

Over the course of a two year period Sultan drove to lumber yards and hardware stores in the Bay Area and Simi Valley, California, where every day hundreds of men waited for temporary employment. Rather than hire them as laborers, Sultan employed them as actors, working with them to choreograph their movements in landscape on the outskirts of suburbia, rehearsing and doing take after take, creating picture after picture. Just as they originally occupied the marginal and transitional zones within the landscape—those that remain overlooked and passed over—Sultan cast these men in similar roles for Homeland, asking them to carefully pose and sit, to cast their gaze outward from the picture frame. Instead of depicting dynamic motion or dramatic action, Sultan created meticulous tableaux that express the interrelated experiences of looking for, leaving and coming home. The notes of longing and melancholy that are present in these photographs are counterbalanced by one of emergent possibility, where the familiarity of the banal can give way to the unforeseen and unexpected.

It was in the act of exploring truths in storytelling, notions of identity and the influence of home that Sultan returned to time and again in his work, regardless of subject matter or setting. The lasting imprint of his childhood and the spaces that defined it—the empty fields behind strip malls and the borderlands of the LA river that ran behind his home in the San Fernando Valley—were areas that represented a small and diminishing stretch of refuge that existed just outside the boundaries of private property. By investigating these spaces in Homeland, Sultan sought to complicate the stereotype of what suburbia was and can be with pictures suff used with anticipation and a quiet reverence for the ordinary.

Larry Sultan grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley, which became a source of inspiration for a number of his projects. His work blends documentary and staged photography to create images of the psychological as well as physical landscape of suburban family life. Sultan’s pioneering book and exhibition Pictures From Home (1992) was a decade long project that features his own mother and father as its primary subjects, exploring photography’s role in creating familial mythologies. Using this same suburban setting, his book, The Valley (2004) examined the adult film industry and the area’s middle-class tract homes that serve as pornographic film sets. Katherine Avenue (2010), the exhibition and book, explored Sultan’s three main series, Pictures From Home, The Valley, and Homeland alongside each other to further examine how Sultan’s images negotiate between reality and fantasy, domesticity and desire, as the mundane qualities of the domestic surroundings become loaded cultural symbols.

Larry Sultan’s work has been exhibited and published widely and is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Modern, the National Gallery, London, the Stedelijk Museum, Musée de l’Elysée, Centre Pompidou, the National Gallery of Art, DC, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he was also recognized with the Bay Area Treasure Award in 2005. Sultan served as a Distinguished Professor of Photography at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946, Larry Sultan passed away at his home in Greenbrae, California in 2009.