Larry Sultan
My Father Reading the Newspaper

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Artist Larry Sultan (American, 1946–2009)American, 1946–2009

CultureAmerican

Titles

My Father Reading the Newspaper
from the series Pictures from Home

Date1985, printed 1987

MediumChromogenic print

DimensionsImage: 17 1/16 × 21 3/16 in. (43.3 × 53.8 cm)
Sheet: 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61 cm)

Credit LineThe Allan Chasanoff Photographic Collection

Object number91.1155

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Special Collections

Allan Chasanoff Photographic Collection

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionInspired by a box of old home movies that he found while visiting his parents in 1982, Larry Sultan began to photograph his parents going about their lives, in search of domestic happiness against the backdrop of the American dream. Pictures from Home is a narrative collage that sets Sultan’s contemporary photographs alongside his parents’ old snapshots and stills from home movies, complicating the social norm of parents photographing their child to raise questions of memory and familial mythology. His father, recently forced into an early retirement, and his mother, a real-estate agent in Los Angeles, became collaborative participants in the decade-long project, responding to the evolving body of work. In this portrait, the thin newsprint—beautifully drenched in sunlight—captures a silhouette, memorializing the figure of the father in an everyday moment, while obscuring his face.
ProvenanceAllan Chasanoff, New York; given to MFAH, 1991.
Exhibition History"Tradition and the Unpredictable: The Allan Chasanoff Photographic Collection," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,January 16-March 27, 1994.

"Optical/Perceptual: Photographs from the Allan Chasanoff Collection," Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, October 6, 2008–January 4, 2009.

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