The Pictures from Home series is included in the retrospective, Larry Sultan: Here and Home opening at SFMOMA on April 15, 2017.

Larry Sultan grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley, which became a source of inspiration for a number of his projects. His work blends documentary and staged photography to create images of the psychological as well as physical landscape of suburban family life. Sultan’s pioneering book and exhibition Pictures From Home (1992) was a decade long project that features his own mother and father as its primary subjects, exploring photography’s role in creating familial mythologies. Using this same suburban setting, his book, The Valley (2004) examined the adult film industry and the area’s middle-class tract homes that serve as pornographic film sets. Katherine Avenue (2010) the exhibition and book, explored Sultan’s three main series, Pictures From Home, The Valley, and Homeland alongside each other to further examine how Sultan’s images negotiate between reality and fantasy, domesticity and desire, as the mundane qualities of the domestic surroundings become loaded cultural symbols. In 2012, the monograph, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel was published to examine in depth the thirty plus year collaboration between these artists as they tackled numerous conceptual projects together, including Billboards, How to Read Music In One Evening, Newsroom, and the seminal photography book Evidence, a collection of found institutional photographs, first published in 1977.

Larry Sultan's work has been widely exhibited and published nationally and internationally and is included in the collections of the Tate Modern, Stedelijk Museum, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he was also recognized with the Bay Area Treasure Award in 2005. Sultan was a beloved educator and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1978 to 1988 and served as a Distinguished Professor of Photography at California College of the Arts, San Francisco from 1989 to 2009.