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 Galchen, 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.

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Helen Shaw on Larry Sultan

Larry Sultan, Business Page (1985)











Helen Shaw has an interesting piece in this week’s issue. Titled “Out of Focus,” it’s a review of Sharr White’s play Pictures From Home, an adaptation of Larry Sultan’s 1992 photo-memoir of the same name. Shaw pans the play, but praises Sultan’s photos, a selection of which, she says, is projected on a wall, part of the stage set. She says of Sultan’s images,

His pieces gleam with a baked Southern California palette: jacaranda light, golf-course-green carpeting, and the parents’ burnished, teak-dark tans. 

She says that White’s play introduced her to Sultan’s work, “which knocked me sideways.” I know the feeling. That’s the way I felt when I first discovered it. His Business Page (1985) is one of my all-time favourite photos (see above). 

For an excellent essay on Sultan’s work, see Philip Gefter’s “Sex and Longing in Larry Sultan’s California Suburbs” (newyorker.com, April 9, 2017).  

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