The Garish Desert of Everyday Life in California

Larry Sultan’s work provokes questions. Is it staged? Is it documentary? Are they posing? Did it happen? So many ways of asking the same things — the wrong things.  The question is, does it move you? Once again, James Barron Art in Kent has a blockbuster show — the five large photographs by Larry Sultan pack a big, angst-ridden, suburban punch. Sultan, who died at 63 in 2009, was an artist who explored the meaning of life by examining what seems ordinary.  He transposed his garish, brooding view onto his subjects. His father famously said in the dialogue that provides text for Sultan’s book “Pictures From Home,” “You have some stake in making us look older and more despairing than we really feel.”

Sultan, an artist who is both brutal and kind with his camera, photographed his parents for more than 10 years after his father, a top salesman for Schick razors, was forced into early retirement. Three of the images in this show are from that project, “Pictures From Home” (the book that came out of his obsessive work with his parents.) “Mom on Chaise Lounge” (1987) shows his too-tan mother sunbathing in a plastic and metal chaise, staring away from the camera as if to avoid her son’s penetrating look. “Palm Springs Sprinkler” (1991) is a picture of the banal poetry of lawn sprinklers and palm trees in the Southern California sun and “Practicing Golf Swing,”(1986) is an iconic image of Sultan’s father swinging a golf club on his green bedroom carpet. He is almost silhouetted by the bright sun coming through sheer drawn curtains, the television is on, and there is an elegance to this handsome, tanned guy, twisted mid-swing, in his golf shirt and undershorts.  That body of work is a glimpse into Sultan’s vision —  a vacant, kind of sad, sunny, upper-middle-class life in Southern California. The pictures are, he admits, more about the photographer than the subject. He said in his introduction to “Pictures From Home,” “What drives me to continue this work is difficult to name. It has more to do with love than with sociology... These are my parents. From that simple fact, everything follows. I realize that beyond the rolls of film and the few good pictures, the demands of my project and my confusion about its meaning, is the wish to take photography literally. To stop time. I want my parents to live forever.”

He examines the same —but different— privileged mundanity in the series he did on porn sets in the ordinary San Fernando Valley tract houses used to shoot many porn movies.  The pictures are the opposite of sexy — harshly lit images from the sets show the workaday quality of these actors’ lives. “Sharon Wild” (2001) is seedy and bleak like an Edward Hopper. A blond actress in her underwear with lucite platform sandals looks sidewise at the camera from her perch on a dirty worn out mattress barely covered with a thin pink sheet. Some sad old-fashioned vinyl suitcases are in the background.  “Boxers, Mission Hills,” 1999 is a picture of  four boxer dogs and their owner, the porn star Rachel Lord.  The image is both casual and intimate as if the photographer was peeking at them from behind a corner. 

The show is up until April 14, don’t miss it. 

James Barron Art, 17 Old Barn Road, Kent, CT., www.jamesbarronart.com