The New Yorker & Me: Chris Wiley's "How Larry Sultan Made His Father a Metaphor for Dashed American Dreams"

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Monday, April 8, 2019

Chris Wiley's "How Larry Sultan Made His Father a Metaphor for Dashed American Dreams"

Larry Sultan, "Empty Pool" (1991)

I relish photography writing. There’s a dandy piece posted yesterday on newyorker.com: Chris Wiley’s “How Larry Sultan Made His Father a Metaphor for Dashed American Dreams” (April 7, 2019). It’s a consideration of, among other things, Sultan’s brilliant “Empty Pool” (1991), included in his 1992 collection Pictures from Home. Wiley says of “Empty Pool,”

In the picture that came out of that poolside photo shoot, we see that behind the elder Sultan is a rolling expanse of tightly cut grass soaking up the water from an automated sprinkler system, which passes for rain in those parts—a landscape on life support. His father is tan, but he is also old, his body clearly heading toward its twilight, and he looks somewhat melancholy—despairing, even—as if the empty pool in front of him were a reservoir of regrets.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Sultan’s dad, for one, would brook no sad-sack poetic crap: “All I know is that you have some stake in making us look older and more despairing than we really feel,” he complains to Sultan in the lengthy, interwoven text of the book. “I really don’t know what you are trying to get at.” The book [Pictures from Home] is filled with this kind of undercutting counter-narrative, culled from Sultan’s interviews with both his father and his mother, Jean, creating a postmodern tug-of-war between representation and reality.

That “as if the empty pool in front of him were a reservoir of regrets” is inspired. Wiley’s piece deepens my appreciation of Sultan’s work. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: Another excellent piece on Sultan’s photography is Philip Gefter’s “Sex and Longing in Larry Sultan’s California Suburbs” (newyorker.com, April 9, 2017).