Larry Sultan: Katherine Avenue - Tapa dura

This book brings together three of Larry Sultans best known series: Pictures from Home, The Valley and Homeland, all mainly made in the San Fernando Valley, California, where the artist grew up. Pictures from Home is a survey of his parents life over the course of a long period; The Valley deals with the Californian pornographic industry which operates out of the suburbs of the region; and Homeland, his late series of landscapes which appear idyllic at first sight but which are fractured by the troubling presence of Mexican day-labourers. In all of his photographs Sultan is dealing with the private, political and social aspects of the american dream a dream he locates somewhere between utopia and dystopia. This publication accompanies an exhibition at the kestnergesellschaft, Hannover. Larry Sultan (19462009) taught photography from 1978 and was a professor at the California College of Arts and Crafts from 1989. He received several National Endowments for the Arts and had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Musée de lElysée, Lausanne, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Co-published with Galerie Thomas Zander, Köln, and kestnergesellschaft, Hannover.