In the last few pages of Larry Sultan’s posthumously published book Water Over Thunder: Select Writings, an excerpt from his archive reveals how the celebrated photographer harboured a desire to be a writer. “I’ve actually thought about stopping photographing for a while and just writing,” he confides in a notebook. “Maybe that would get closer to the bone.” Through this new book, which traces his practice and focuses on his symbiotic use of word and image, Sultan perhaps achieved this goal of getting as close to the bone as one could. Published by MACK and assembled by Kelly Sultan, his widow and manager of the Larry Sultan Estate, and his son, Maxwell Sultan, Water Over Thunder collates facsimiles of journal entries, lists from notebooks, family photographs, transcripts of class lectures, contact sheets, postcards and other ephemera. 

The Brooklyn-born, California-raised photographer’s projects, including books such as Evidence, made in collaboration with Mike Mandel, and Pictures from Home, investigate the cracks in suburban life and are foundational to studies of 20th-century American photography. But what makes this new book unique, besides the previously unpublished visual archive, is Sultan’s writing, which is nuanced and precise. He is attentive to both the expansiveness and limitations of making images, writing in one instance that “taking pictures is a way of thinking” and, in another, expressing his disinterest in creating images that have a straightforward narrative or are purely illustrative. 

Sultan’s writing ranges in form – journal entries, lists, typed-out transcripts, and photoshoot notes – and also in content, moving from biographical anecdotes to theoretical citations of Carl Jung and Roland Barthes. To celebrate the publication of Water Over Thunder, we take a look at the artist's life, work and approach to photography through his own words. 

“PHOTOGRAPHY WAS A NATURAL OUTGROWTH OF JUST BEING ABSTRACTED; TO ENDLESSLY LOOKING AT THE WORLD”

In the first section of the book, titled Sunset Strip, Sultan recounts his biography, stating how he became a photographer because nothing else held any meaning to him. He shares how he found a profession that suited his personality, one that was always deeply observant and keenly interested in the mundane. He writes of his childhood, when he was the “kind of kid who used to stand there with his mouth open and stare at things”. Despite being born in Brooklyn, Sultan is only faintly familiar with that time in his life, feeling a greater kinship with Southern California. It was when he moved to the Bay Area in 1970 that the streets began to interest him deeply, allowing him to “participate in a way that felt right” through photography, despite feeling like he didn’t necessarily fit in. This sense of alienation was also documented in the photographer’s military service psychiatric report from 1969, which forms part of the visual archive of the book, where the doctor shares how Sultan refers to himself as a “left-out observer looking inside”. 

“WHAT MOVED ME TO BE A PHOTOGRAPHER WAS THAT ONE COULD MAKE IMAGES [...] THAT WERE POPULIST, THAT DEALT WITH DAILY LIFE, THAT DEALT WITH OUR TIMES”

Sultan recalls being “bored to tears” by the romanticism surrounding the photographic traditions of San Francisco and the Beat Generation. He writes, “I didn’t understand the language of academic critique, and I didn’t feel comfortable sitting in café culture. I was interested in Bob’s Big Boy combo plates with Thousand Island dressing and French fries.” The photographer, one could easily discern, was endlessly fascinated by popular culture and what constituted normalcy. He notes that his access to visual culture was not through art museums but through billboards on the Sunset Strip. The early realisation that advertising is a legitimate form of image-making led to a long-term collaborative public art project with Mike Mandel, in which the artists created open-ended designs for billboards in the San Francisco area. Mandel, who shared a disdain for bohemian traditions, wanted this art to reach a public that would rarely find themselves in a traditional art setting. Referencing one of the duo’s first billboards, Oranges on Fire, Sultan explains in his writing how “by recognising and working within the structure of the language of advertising”, they were able to subvert the communication strategy of an advertisement to shock, subvert and share their own message. 

“I FELT THAT FAMILY WAS ONE OF THE MOST COMPLICATED, UNNERVING INSTITUTIONS. YET IT IS THE INSTITUTION MOST OF US BELIEVE IN”

It was during the Reagan era – when suburban bliss, white picket fences, and the perfect family were highly sought after in America – that Sultan created his most recognisable works, Pictures From Home and Home Movie Stills. These projects were attentive to the American dream, examining its cracks and its optimistic promises. In a 1990 interview with the artist for Bomb Magazine, the cultural critic Catherine Liu referred to these pictures as “discovering what being American is about”. Sultan’s own interest in home movies and staging family photographs stemmed from curiosity about why the family as an institution survives even as the government, the church, and the bank failed. Pictures From Home was created over several visits to his parents’ brightly coloured retirement home in Palm Springs. Home Movie Stills is a deep dive into his father’s old 8mm films, where the artist would take them out of context and create new configurations of the footage. He reminisces about noticing details in these stills that he hadn’t noticed before or would have considered insignificant, such as a redwood fence or a t-shirt his older brother wore, which “stirred up an atmosphere of the past” and allowed the artist to time-travel and insert himself into his childhood. He described this feeling as akin to coming home.

“WHAT I REALLY WANTED TO DO WAS THE IMPOSSIBLE – TO TRANSMIT THE FEELING OF A LIFE BEING LIVED”

As Sultan’s writing and practice progress throughout the book, he becomes more outwardly sentimental in his approach to photography. His words similarly take a turn for the emotional. Referring to photographing his parents in Pictures From Home, he wrote, “That’s the heart of it. Behind all the peering and the good pictures, and the anxiety of my ‘project', is the futile wish to take photography literally. To stop time. I want them to live forever.“ This writing is accompanied by contact sheets and notebook scans, where he sketched out the project and finished photographs. In one scan from a notebook, he writes, “How can you photograph or feel the story of another without reducing it to a case study?” This responsibility, which he felt to represent his parents properly, was a source of anxiety for the photographer and is referenced a few times throughout the text. To rectify this, Sultan spent nine years interviewing his parents to tell their story and had them participate in the project. He shares, “They wrote, we discussed the pictures, they dismantled my position, I was under question.” 

Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings by Larry Sultan is published by MACK and is available here now.