Art Knowledge News
Larry Sultan, Photographer & Longtime CCA Faculty Member, Dies at 63 |
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| Written by Tammy Rae Carland |
| Thursday, 17 December 2009 03:54 |
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Tammy Rae Carland, chair of the Photography Program, says, "Larry Sultan was one of the most compassionate, generous educators I've ever known. He was a great mentor, a great teacher, a great colleague. He had a lot of success in his own career but continued to be vital to the Photography Program. He really cared about its pedagogical development, about keeping it current and lively. He was incredibly generous with his students, always sharing his network, his experience, his connections. He got a tremendous amount of pleasure out of teaching." Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, says, "Larry Sultan was a leading figure in the Bay Area art community. He was one of our great friends and a gifted artist. His work has been shown in our museum regularly since the 1970s. His responses to our world have always been both intensely personal and wonderfully humane, accessible, intelligent, and sympathetic." In addition to his teaching career and extensive commercial work for 'W Magazine', 'Vanity Fair', and other important clients, he produced a large and widely influential body of personal work. His first major project was a collaboration with the artist Mike Mandel: a book of appropriated photographs titled 'Evidence' and a subsequent exhibition organized by SFMOMA in 1977. The pictures came from the files of government agencies, corporations, and research institutions, offering a witty and provocative look at contemporary American culture.  In 1992 Sultan compiled the book and accompanying exhibition
"Pictures from Home". The decade-long project began when his father, a vice
president at Schick Safety Razor Company, was forced into early retirement.
Sultan started by photographing his parents and their home lives, then expanded
the undertaking to include extensive diaristic writing, family artifacts, and
stills from his parents' home movies. Working in the San Fernando Valley on "Pictures from Home" led Sultan to his next project, "The Valley", an investigation of suburban houses used as sets for pornographic films. Like "Pictures from Home", the project focused on Southern California culture, engaging ideas of truth, fantasy, and artifice in the context of home and middle-class domesticity. "The Valley" was presented at SFMOMA in 2004 as a solo exhibition of more than 50 large-scale photographs shot between 1999 and 2003. In the pictures, mundane objects such as a roll of paper towels or a bored woman in high heels become symbolically charged, inviting speculation. Sultan exhibited internationally throughout his career. His work is in the collections of SFMOMA; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate Modern, London. He received numerous grants and awards, including five NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Louis Tiffany Comfort Award, and a Fleishhacker Fellowship. Visit the The California College of the Arts at : http://www.cca.edu/ Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
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