A New E-book on Photographer Larry Sultan Dives Into His Deepest Musings and Anxieties

Larry Sultan has lengthy been celebrated as one of the crucial essential photographers of the twentieth century. But a brand new e-book from MACK, Water Over Thunder, reveals that writing was by no means secondary to his image-making observe—it was foundational. According to his household and stewards of the California native’s property and archive, writing, educating—which Sultan did on the San Francisco Art Institute from 1978 to 1988 and on the California College of the Arts—and taking pictures weren’t separate disciplines, however “an integrated pursuit.”

This integration might be traced again to Sultan’s earliest collaborations, like Evidence, which he made with Mike Mandel. In the work—which featured a set of discovered images in company and authorities archives—pictures had been stripped of captions and institutional context, and resequenced with out clarification. The removing of phrases turned as conceptually charged as their presence elsewhere in Sultan’s work. In Pictures From Home, textual content re-entered the body in a deeply private method—letters, transcripts, reflections—forming what his household describes as “another kind of collaboration,” this time together with his dad and mom. Writing there didn’t clarify the pictures, it destabilized them, collapsing the space between photographer and topic. Sultan was by no means curious about standing exterior his materials. He needed to exist inside it.

Water Over Thunder makes this porousness seen. The chosen journals, lectures, dream fragments, and essays, many unpublished till now, present Sultan utilizing writing as a technique of pondering by confusion. As his son, Maxwell Sultan, says, the writing helped him “have conversations with himself.”

Sultan was each intensely pushed and profoundly uncertain, and his notebooks observe that stress in actual time. This ethos formed not solely his artwork, however his educating. “I consider students fellow travelers,” Sultan wrote. “The idea of identity, ‘artist’ as conditional, conferred by evaluation, based on a criteria outside of oneself can only lead to conformity and the stifling of the creative spirit.” This passage clarifies what the e-book confirms: Sultan didn’t place himself as an authority dishing out solutions. He modeled vulnerability. He introduced unfinished work into the classroom. He invited critique of his personal images with the identical seriousness he utilized to his college students’. Sultan additionally valued humor and pure enjoyable. His class assignments and subject journeys typically wandered removed from strict images—assume ballroom dance classes, journeys to the racetrack, a magic present, or behind-the-scenes on the Natural History Museum.

The e-book’s title stems from an early draft of Pictures from Home, the place Sultan describes starting a venture as a state during which “everything is in motion…it seems impossible to find a break in the surface.” His household displays on this “break” as that testing interval—when one thing feels charged, however unproven, when a venture may be deserted or would possibly deepen. Writing was typically the place the place that uncertainty was metabolized. It was the place he tracked his concern, ambition, boredom, attraction: the inner tempest of creation.

Importantly, the supplies reproduced in Water Over Thunder—contact sheets, outtakes, annotated layouts, e-book maquettes—present how constructed even his most intimate pictures had been. Assistants recall how, even on commissioned editorial shoots, Sultan would construct a body meticulously—adjusting lighting, repositioning figures, refining the scene by Polaroids earlier than committing to the ultimate publicity. Yet he typically sequenced images in ways in which preserved confusion reasonably than smoothing it out.

As his household notes, he might have edited to look extra coherent, extra sure—however selected to not. That willingness to go away the seams seen parallels the e-book’s construction itself: chapters meander, sections might be entered at random, meanings shift relying on the place one begins.

What emerges is a portrait of an artist who understood efficiency—throughout the household, on a porn set in The Valley, or within the classroom—not as artifice alone, however as a shared act of meaning-making.

For youthful artists and writers, the reward of Water Over Thunder could also be exactly this transparency. The e-book doesn’t supply a components. It reveals a sort of life course of: teetering between drive and doubt, the need of failure, the worth of sitting with a query earlier than speeding to call it. It exhibits {that a} observe isn’t solely the completed work however the pondering round it. All of the non-public grappling, the aborted makes an attempt, and the rewritten passages nobody was meant to see.

“I know I change all the time,” Sultan scrawled.