When researching the photographing of intimate relationships, Larry Sultan’s Pictures From Home stood out to me as work that felt very similar to the concept of what I am doing in my project Darling. Both works are exploring the relationships within the family, however Sultan’s work is perhaps more literal and direct than my own.
Over the course of ten years Larry Sultan documented his parents combining candid and staged portraits with stills from home movies, the resulting book ‘Pictures From Home’ is a widely celebrated and recognised embodiment of the dynamics within family relationships.
In an interview for the San Francisco Museum of Morden Art Sultan describes the feeling of photographing the intimacy in his family and making it public as a secret betrayal; tearing apart the trust between himself and his parents. To work around this feeling, Sultan began to work with his parents as collaborators, discussing the photographs and their performances. The text in Pictures From Home is a combination of Sultan’s own reflections and his parents which often contrast his own perspective. It deepens the complexity with that of his father as there are a lot of conflicting views between the two. What is most important about this is the voice given to his parents, this voice adds to the collaboration and enriches the work through the conflicted and complex relationship between father and son. This influenced me to develop the collaboration with my partner for my project Darling; inviting my partner to contribute her poems to the book in order to not only provide a voice for her but to further the complexity of our relationship in the work.
Reflecting on the authenticity in the found and created imagery in Pictures From Home, and the performance of his parents, Sultan stated “To me the truth is about performance and how we perform, how we project, and the truth can be stage and it can be found.” (Sultan, 2003). In this he is not only reflecting on the images he staged or took, but also the archival material taken from the family photo books and home movies, stating that they are all fictional representations of the family institution. This rings true to the way I work – especially in my project Darling, the subjects (my partner and I) are performing our relationship, our perspective and our relationship to the world. It isn’t situated in the idea of family as an institution like Pictures From Home but the emotional responses we are performing and creating are true to us.
Reference
https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/larry-sultan-here-and-home/
http://larrysultan.com/gallery/pictures-from-home/
CRJ 