Pictures From Home

First published in 1992 to wide critical acclaim, Pictures From Home is Larry Sultan's pendant to his parents.

Sultan returned home to Southern California periodically in the 1980s and the decade-long sequence moves between registers, combining contemporary photographs with film stills from home movies, fragments of conversation, Sultan's own writings and other memorabilia. The result is a narrative collage in which the boundary between the documentary and the staged becomes increasingly ambiguous. Simultaneously the distance usually maintained between the photographer and his subjects also slips in an exchange of dialogue and emotion that is unique to this work.

Significantly increasing the page count of the original book, this MACK design of Pictures From Home clarifies the multiplicity of voices - both textual and pictorial - in order to afford a fresh perspective of this seminal body of work.

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 falter. I wake up in the middle of the night, stunned and anguished. These are my parents. From that simple fact, everything follows. -- Larry Sultan.