Pictures from Home

Pictures from Home is Larry Sultan's decade-long portrait of his parents in their San Fernando Valley home, and it stands among the most influential photobooks made about family, memory and the American domestic interior.

Beginning in the early 1980s, Sultan repeatedly photographed his father Irving and mother Jean in the house where he grew up, staging scenes drawn from memory alongside pictures made in the ordinary course of their days. The book interweaves these color photographs with stills from his father's home movies, family snapshots, and transcribed conversations with his parents, building a layered, sometimes contradictory portrait that questions the truth claims of documentary photography itself. First published in 1992 to wide critical acclaim, the work was reissued by MACK in 2017 with a reworked design and expanded sequence.

Sultan, who taught for decades at California College of the Arts and died in 2009, is remembered as a central figure in the staged and suburban strands of American color photography; Pictures from Home remains the project most closely identified with his work, and its influence runs through later photographers working at the boundary of documentary and staged family portraiture.