Pictures From Home.

Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home (1982-92) is part family album, part visual novella, bringing together family snapshots, memento mori, and text. This portrait of the home evokes the critical issues of aging, disparity, wealth, relationships, real estate and ubiquitous family values, and conveys the conventional cliché benchmarks that define postwar American nuclear families: birth of children, financial security, corporate success, as well as the need for a life outside the home. An intimate record of the mundane existence of everyday events and rituals found in the home captures optimism, humor, dislocation; it reveals intimate lives and perpetuates façades like secrets disclosed. Sultan understands the camera’s function as the family’s primary instrument of self-knowledge and self-representation by which family memory perpetuates, using it to re-examine family, but also undermining any claim that photographs and their arrangements are necessarily an accurate form of documentation of family life (Merriah Lamb). Cited in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Volume II.