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).