How Larry Sultan's photos of his parents became a landmark work - and now a play
"Reading at the Kitchen Table" (1988) by Larry Sultan (Larry Sultan)
From 1982 to 1992, Bay Area photographer Larry Sultan returned again and again to his parents' San Fernando Valley home, creating images that were intimate, unsettling and quietly theatrical.
The project became a ritual. Every four to six weeks, he traveled from Marin with borrowed equipment from the San Francisco Art Institute or California College of the Arts, schools where he taught. The process turned his retirement-age parents, Irving and Jean, into both subjects and collaborators.
The resulting 1992 book, "Pictures from Home," became Sultan's defining work and cemented his reputation as one of the country's most esteemed color documentary photographers before his death from cancer in 2009 at 63. It was a labor of love and an unusual creative endeavor in which filial, artistic and sociological impulses were all tangled together.
The photographs, including those made after Irving and Jean moved to a midcentury ranch home in Palm Desert (Riverside County), have been exhibited and collected worldwide. The candids and staged domestic tableaux have influenced generations of photographers focused on suburbia and family. They have also now inspired a play of the same name, written by Sharr White, whose Marin Theatre production begins performances on Thursday, May 7, under the direction of Jonathan Moscone.
A miniature model of the set for "Pictures from Home," a play about late Marin-based photographer Larry Sultan and his decade-long project documenting his parents, at Marin Theatre Company. (Erik Castro/For the S.F. Chronicle)
"Larry didn't know whether it was all going to be of interest to anybody else, but he stuck with it for 10 years because he knew he had questions and was working through something," Kelly Sultan, the photographer's widow and manager of the Larry Sultan Estate, told the Chronicle.
More Information
"Pictures from Home": Written by Sharr White. Directed by Jonathan Moscone. Performances begin Thursday, May 7. Through May 31. $38-$94. Marin Theatre, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. 415-388-5208. www.marintheatre.org
Pictures from Home
By Larry Sultan
(Third MACK printing; 192 pages; $65)
SFMOMA discussion of Larry Sultan's new book "Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings": 6 p.m. Thursday, May 21. Free with RSVP. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., S.F. www.sfmoma.org
Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings
By Larry Sultan
(MACK; 320 pages; $60)
From her longtime home with Sultan along the Greenbrae boardwalk, she recalled what a driven and yet "uncertain" time it was for her late husband while making the iconic photos.
"It was very important for him to question why we believe in photographs and to acknowledge that the truth can be found and the truth can also be created," she said.
The play, like the book that inspired it, explores Reagan-era masculinity, the fraying American Dream and photography's own fictions, in which what's pictured is never as straightforward as it seems.
Sultan sneaked photos of his mother napping on her stomach, revealing grass stains on her heels, and a quasi-still life of a blood pressure cuff and reading glasses on her nightstand. He also directed his bemused parents to pose in their tropical-hued clothes against the avocado-green walls and shag carpet of their final home.
"My Mother Posing" (1984) by Larry Sulta (1996-98 AccuSoft Inc., All right/Courtesy the Estate of Larry Sultan)
Irving and Jean were reluctant, quizzical and at times grumpy accomplices in this now-iconic endeavor. Sultan also struggled at first to gain interest from gallerists and curators in the images.
"They did not get a warm welcome," Kelly recalled. "He was questioned because he was a man and taking (domestic) pictures of his family. That wasn't understood initially."
Kelly cited San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Curator Emeritus of Photography Sandy Phillips, as "one very important early voice of support." Phillips showed images from the family series in a 1989 exhibition while Sultan was still shooting it and later championed bringing the 2015 retrospective "Here and Home" from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to San Francisco. (SFMOMA has six photos from Sultan's "Pictures from Home" series in its permanent collection. On May 21, the museum plans to host a discussion of Sultan's new, posthumously published book, "Water over Thunder.")
White recalled seeing that LACMA exhibition with a friend and leaving the museum feeling "intensely intrigued."
He was particularly struck by Sultan's 1984 photo of his father sitting on the edge of his bed in a blue business suit, his hands clasped in his lap. Irving, who had worked his way up to vice president at Schick Safety Razor Company before being forced into early retirement, seemed in the image to reveal a rare sliver of vulnerability.
"Part of what makes the work so extraordinary is that tension between the raw intimacy of this intimidating man and the mask that he maintains," White told the Chronicle in a separate interview.
Victor Talmadge, left, Daniel Cantor and Susan Koozin in Marin Theater's production of "Pictures From Home." (Chris Hardy)
A play with three characters - father, mother, son - discussing, among other things, how photography reveals and conceals, started percolating in his mind.
"I bought the (Sultan's) book that day, and on my flight home (to New York), I sketched out the very first scene of the play right there and then," White said.
Now, three years after "Pictures from Home" ran on Broadway starring Nathan Lane, much of that first scene, White said, "remains the same."
Like Sultan's book, the play is personal, self-questioning and infused with the teasing humor between the photographer and his father.
"Larry is trying to understand his parents, and he's locking horns with them," explained Moscone. "It's less of an argument than it is a witty game of chess."
In the Marin production, Bay Area and Broadway theater veterans Daniel Cantor ("Waste" at Marin Theatre last year) and Victor Talmadge play Larry and Irving, respectively. Susan Koozin makes her Marin debut as Jean.
The three Sultans tussle and cajole each other about why Larry finds his parents' day-to-day suburban life so visually remarkable.
Kelly Sultan pointed to Larry's own words, some of which are used verbatim in the play, as providing the best answer to that question: "What drives me to continue this work is difficult to name," he wrote. "It has more to do with love than with sociology, with being a subject in the drama rather than a witness."
As audiences watch the family spar, their allegiances are likely to shift between Larry and his parents' perspectives, "which keeps the work exciting," Moscone said.
Director Jonathan Moscone claps during a rehearsal of "Pictures from Home," a play about late Marin-based photographer Larry Sultan and his decade-long project documenting his parents at Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley. (Erik Castro/For the S.F. Chronicle)
That emotional complexity was part of what drew Moscone to the production when Marin Theatre Artistic Director Lance Gardner asked him to direct the play's West Coast premiere. After all, Moscone, former artistic director of the California Shakespeare Theater, is a man whose own life has been shaped by a paternal relationship - and its absence. Moscone was 14 in 1978 when his dad, George Moscone, then San Francisco's mayor, was assassinated, along with San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk.
Moscone's 2011 play, "Ghost Light," about his own complex relationship with his father, was similarly "both biographical and fictional," he said, adding that his own life has helped him " understand the tonal richness of these relationships."
Throughout the play, key images from Sultan's "Pictures from Home" book will be projected at large scale on stage and will appear to be floating above the scenery.Referring again to one of Sultan's most famous images, "Dad on Bed," White noted that the photographer's exploration of masculinity itself was very much on his mind as he translated the photo memoir into a work for the stage.
"Larry writes in the book that he's searching for a different maleness," White said, "and he's asking, ‘What is it to be male in a way that is not Irv's way of being male, with a different kind of sensitivity?'"
As Kelly explained, the Sultan men were so enmeshed in this lengthy artistic endeavor that her photographer husband sometimes felt the lines blurring between them.
"Maybe that's part of what I'm doing - sneaking into my father's closet and trying on his clothes, except now the shoes fit and have for some time," he wrote. "And I'll tell you something - I look at some of the pictures I've made and I don't know whom I was photographing. It looks like my father but it feels like me."
Jessica Zack is a freelance writer.
