Pictures from Home, Larry Sultan
About the Book:
First published in 1992 to wide critical acclaim, Pictures From Home is Larry Sultan’s pendant to his parents. Sultan returned home to Southern California periodically in the 1980s and the decade-long sequence moves between registers, combining contemporary photographs with film stills from home movies, fragments of conversation, Sultan’s own writings and other memorabilia. The result is a narrative collage in which the boundary between the documentary and the staged becomes increasingly ambiguous. Simultaneously the distance usually maintained between the photographer and his subjects also slips in an exchange of dialogue and emotion that is unique to this work.
Though it’s a famous photobook, I was only exposed to it through the play, Pictures from Home, that was on Broadway in 2023, starring Danny Burstein and Nathan Lane. When I received that card in the mail announcing the show I knew it was right up my alley: an autobiographical story, father and son relationship, based on photographs that were taken by the son.
Over a year later, I was preparing a workshop proposal called “Activating Your Archives” for the Transformative Language Arts Network Power of Words conference. I thought about what I wanted to share. Last year I presented Using TLA to Create and Deepen Your Family Archives. This time I wanted to show how archives could be less dusty, less precious even.
We often think about archives as something that gets saved, memorialized, put away to be discovered for other generations. But I think there’s something significant to be said about going into your parent’s stories, relating them to your own, sharing that legacy with your kids. It requires an archivist to take an active role in interpreting the archive (and, as it happens, oneself).
Reading through the book of Pictures from Home, I’m struck with the weighting of the author’s voice, as he reflects upon the photos that he takes, the process of taking those photos, and commenting on his parents’ stories. He juxtaposes his age to his father’s, comparing them as teens, as adults. He shows themselves as teenagers next to each other. He juxtaposes his parents’ stories next to each other, often contradicting, sometimes offered without comment.
On the first page of text, Sultan is at his parents’ home after his parents had gone to bed. He’s in the middle of the project, he’s been photographing them for years. He writes, “Tonight, however, I’m restless. I sit at the dining-room table; rummage through the refrigerator. What am I looking for?
“My body seems to grow smaller, as if it is finally adjusting itself to the age I feel whenever I’m in their house. It’s like I’m releasing the air from an inflatable image and shrinking back down to an essential form. Is this why I’ve come here? To find myself by photographing them?”
From an autoethnographic perspective, I think the questions Sultan poses are the answers, right? In this short paragraph he captures what it is to return home, what is it to return home? Why do we become the age we were, settle into old roles, see our parents as they always were?