Larry Sultan
[Photographer, b. 1946, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2009, Greenbrae, California.]
…the more you try to control the world the less magic you get. It’s really about being open and surprised.
...when it comes down to making work that really sings, I don’t know if I can teach any of it. I don’t even know if I can do any of it half the time. It’s so much about failure, it’s so much about making pictures that are so utterly boring and overstated, you’re endlessly disappointed. And in that process you hopefully find something that draws you back and calls to you.
Literature especially has an interesting relationship to photography—to observation, to description, to fiction: taking something that you see and elaborating, jamming, and I think, staging.... taking that moment of observation and letting it go, giving it some wings, following it, rather than nailing it. You’re riffing off of reality.
“Pornography” is such a loaded word. I think it’s gotten really clear recently because we’ve seen some really serious pornography with the Iraqi prisoners, along with the graphic descriptions of what happened. It’s really a time of oppression and also a time of such perversion. My work is so mild, and so much about tenderness and empathy—there’s nothing pornographic about it.
I’ve actually thought about stopping photographing for a while and just writing, maybe that would get closer to the bone.
