Yancey Richardson Gallery is currently holding an exhibition of work by Larry Sultan, the first in New York since 2004. Sultan passed away in 2009. The photographs are selected from Sultan’s series Pictures from Home), Untitled Home Movie Stills and The Valley, in addition to editorial work made between 1993 and 2003 for Wallpaper and Bottega Veneta. Sultan probed the medium of photography, experimenting with its structure and challenging its truth-telling capabilities. A hybrid of documentary and staged photography often touched with tender irony, his photographs mine the psychological nuances in daily family interaction across the suburban landscape. Throughout, Sultan’s images negotiate between reality and fantasy, domesticity and desire, revealing the personal and the idiosyncratic in the flow of ordinary life.

Just as his personal work shaped his editorial work, the assignments informed Sultan’s personal projects, leading most significantly to the extended series The Valley. On assignment in 1997 Sultan discovered that the adult-film industry frequently rented the suburban tract houses of his childhood neighborhood in order to create x-rated dramas. Photographing during porn shoots in the homes of dentists, lawyers and accountants, Sultan juxtaposed the naked bodies of actors with the mundane domesticity of the homes, including glimpses of the jeans-clad production crew and their hard-edged equipment as visual clues.