Larry Sultan, Backyard, Roscomare, from the series The Valley, 2003. Archival pigment print, 40 x 50 inches.
Larry Sultan, Boxers, Mission Hills, from the series The Valley, 1999. Archival pigment print, 40 x 50 inches.
Larry Sultan, Pool, Calabasas, from the series The Valley, 2002. Archival pigment print, 40 x 50 inches.
Larry Sultan, Satsuma Studio, from the series The Valley, 2003. Archival pigment print, 40 x 50 inches.
Larry Sultan, Sharon Wild, from the series The Valley, 2001. Archival pigment print, 30 x 40 inches.
Larry Sultan, Tasha’s Third Film, from the series The Valley, 1998. Archival pigment print, 50 x 60 inches.
Larry Sultan, Vivid Entertainment #2, 2003. Archival pigment print, 30 x 40 inches.
Larry Sultan, Woman in Curlers, from the series The Valley, 2002. Archival pigment print, 60 x 50 inches.
Larry Sultan, Kitchen, Santa Clarita, 2001. Archival pigment print, 41 1/2 x 57 inches.
Casemore Gallery and Yancey Richardson are excited to partner at Frieze LA, where they will present a solo booth of works from Larry Sultan’s iconic photo series The Valley (1998–2003). A seminal meditation on the actors, crews and built environment of the adult film industry in California’s San Fernando Valley during the 1990s and 2000s, the series has become an essential body of work on suburbia. It reveals a place and time when aspiring film stars, sex work and bucolic domesticity discreetly coexisted in Los Angeles County, and engenders a broader understanding of the elasticity of the ‘American Dream.’ This will be the first time the work has been seen in the Los Angeles area since Sultan’s 2014 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Having grown up in the San Fernando Valley, Sultan made that expanse of land and suburban development one of his recurring subjects, treating it as a wellspring of inspiration and a source of insight into the social life of America. Sultan’s photographs toggle between documentary, re-staging the spontaneous and pure construction to explore the psychological nuances of suburban life and charge the architecture of domestic space—so familiar that it is often overlooked—revealing a complex current of feeling, belief and experience ebbing just beneath the surface.
In The Valley, Sultan once again looked at the neighborhoods and homes he knew from his childhood, but this time as living backdrops for the adult film industry. Rented for the two or three days needed to make a film, the subjects of Sultan’s photographs become these suburban interiors with their personal touches and backyards full of lawn furniture as the uncanny foil for the fantasies and desires of an alternate family of cast and crew temporarily in residence. The viewer is rewarded for patiently exploring the banality of the domestic space as the main protagonist while Sultan works around the obvious action to find moments of connection within the mundane and the unexpected. As Sultan observed, “…by photographing this I’m planted squarely in the terrain of my own ambivalence—that rich and fertile field that stretches out between fascination and repulsion, desire and loss. I’m home again.”
