Larry Sultan

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Larry Sultan (born July 13, 1946 in Brooklyn , New York City , USA , † December 13, 2009 in Greenbrae , California ) was an American artist and photographer .

Life

Sultan grew up in the San Fernando Valley, northeast of Los Angeles . His father worked for the local entertainment industry. He was educated at the University of California , where he graduated in 1968 with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. He then studied at the San Francisco Art Institute , where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts in photography in 1973 . Sultan was Professor of Photography and Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in Oakland until the end of his life .

In his artistic work, Sultan constantly and critically dealt with perception, reality and the false claim that photography is documentation. At best, a photo shows the emergence of ideas, not reality.

Sultan's success was not only expressed in his worldwide exhibitions of large-format, sometimes wall-filling photographs; many museums and private individuals also acquired his works.

Sultan was married.

Works (excerpt)

Sultan's first widely acclaimed work was the series Evidence , which he compiled with Mike Mandel in 1977 . Evidence brings together 59 photographs that the two artists brought together from police archives, the archive of the Ministry of the Interior and various institutions and companies. The individual pictures showed arrangements from experiments or other situations incomprehensible to the viewer due to the lack of subtitles. The series was exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and later published as a book.

  • 1989: with others: Headlands: The Marin Coast at the Golden Gate . University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, ISBN 0-826311520 .
  • 1992: Pictures from Home .
    The artist has collected pictures of his own family from 10 years. This resulted in an inventory of life in the suburbs of California's megacities, especially the small-town life in which the Sultan himself grew up.
  • 2003: The Valley .
    The color images and the resulting book deal with the “sets”, the locations that private individuals make available during the production of pornographic films. In these 'locations', which are always located in the Californian suburb environment, the actors are often depicted in a very absent, uninvolved pose. The viewer becomes a voyeur , the voyeur becomes a thoughtful melancholic.
  • 2007: We are Family
  • 2009: Homeland .
    This series is about the everyday life of Mexican day laborers who work illegally in California.

Solo exhibitions (selection)

  • 2004: Larry Sultan: The Valley , San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
  • 2004: Larry Sultan: The Valley Series , Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne
  • 2004: Larry Sultan: The Valley , Campus Galerie, Bayreuth
  • 2009: Larry Sultan: Homeland , Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne
  • 2010: Larry Sultan: Katherine Avenue , Kestnergesellschaft , Hanover
  • 2015: Larry Sultan: Werkschau , Kunstmuseum Bonn , February 4 to May 17, 2015. Catalog published together with the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst , Ghent , Belgium .
  • 2015: Larry Sultan , Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium.

Group exhibition

literature

  • Harry N. Abrams (Ed.): Pictures from Home . 1992, ISBN 0-8109-3721-2 .
  • The Valley / Larry Sultan . Scalo, Zurich 2004, ISBN 3-908247-79-9 .
  • Veit Görner, Martin Germann, Thomas Zander (eds.): Katherine Avenue / Larry Sultan , translated by Jeremy Gaines and Michael Stoeber; Steidl, Göttingen 2010 ISBN 978-3-86930-135-8 ; for the exhibition in the Kestnergesellschaft.
  • Larry Sultan: Here and Home . Prestel, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-79135388-3 .
  • Exhibition catalog: Larry Sultan , de / en. Kerber Verlag, Bielefeld 2015, ISBN 978-3-7356-0069-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Photographer Larry Sultan: Photos of strange proximity , portrait of the artist by Michael Köhler on Deutschlandradio Kultur on February 4, 2015, accessed February 6, 2015
  2. ↑ Randy Kennedy: "Larry Sultan, California Photographer, Dies at 63" , in: NY Times, December 14, 2009 (English)
  3. ↑ Larry Sultan: Positions of a so-called “post-conceptual” photography , Kunstmuseum Bonn, curated by Stefan Gronert
  4. ↑ A photo proves nothing at all in FAZ from March 13, 2015, page 13

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Sultan, Larry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American artist and photographer
DATE OF BIRTH July 13, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn , New York City , USA
DATE OF DEATH December 13, 2009
Place of death Greenbrae , California , USA