The Valley

Larry Sultan's The Valley photographs the pornography industry at work inside the same tract-house suburbs he grew up in and had already photographed his parents within, and the collision of the two subjects is the point: the Valley as both the birthplace of the American domestic ideal and, by the late 1990s, the production capital of adult film.

Between 1998 and 2003 Sultan spent time on sets rented in ordinary San Fernando Valley houses. He photographed not the sex acts themselves but the surrounding apparatus of the shoot: crew members waiting between takes, a boom operator crouched beside a suburban bed, a performer resting on a stripped mattress with a lamp and houseplant behind her. The large-format color images play the flat light and generic furnishings of tract-house interiors against the artifice of the productions staged inside them. They extend the questions about domesticity, performance and the camera's presence that had structured Pictures from Home. Scalo published the work as The Valley in 2004, a 127-page hardcover monograph.

Sultan (1946–2009) taught for decades at California College of the Arts. He is remembered for a body of work, Evidence (made with Mike Mandel), Pictures from Home, and The Valley, that repeatedly tested where documentary photography ends and staging begins.