Join us at ICP to celebrate the release of Larry Sultan’s Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings (MACK, $60), with a program focusing on the writing and pedagogy that informed Sultan’s landmark photographs. The afternoon will include a screening of a selection of shorts Sultan admired as well as contributions from photographers who were impacted by his teaching and photographs.
This program is being offered both in person at ICP, located on NYC's Lower East Side, and online. Tickets to attend the conversation in person are $5 and do not include access to ICP’s galleries. Add on admission to the museum and arrive early to see our current exhibitions Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation, HARD COPY NEW YORK and Latitudes: Nuits Balnéaires and François-Xavier Gbré on view until May 4, 2026.
About the Book
Larry Sultan was one of the most important and celebrated photographers of the twentieth century, but his lifelong commitment to writing is less well known. Water Over Thunder is the first publication devoted to Sultan’s wide-ranging use of writing as a personal, artistic, and pedagogic tool. The selected texts – many unpublished until now – come from Sultan’s numerous journals and notebooks, encompassing reflections on his teaching and art practice, drafts for short stories, vivid dream diaries, and polished essays. Interspersed throughout are extracts from Sultan’s eloquent public lectures and interviews, illuminating the questions he investigated throughout his life and emphasizing the thematic underpinnings of his best known series: Pictures from Home, Evidence (with Mike Mandel), and The Valley. Throughout these various writings, water appears as an important literal and metaphorical force. The book’s title is derived from an early draft of Pictures from Home in which Sultan writes about the process of beginning a new artistic project: ‘Everything is in motion, spinning off of surfaces and slamming against shadowy forms ... it seems impossible to find a break in the surface.’
This volume is illustrated throughout with previously unseen materials from Sultan’s archive: marked contact sheets, outtakes, scouting shots, selections from his found photo collection, and layout pages from his book maquettes. As a whole, Water Over Thunder illuminates Sultan’s extraordinary way of working and forms an intimate portrait of an artist thinking through his craft and the world around him in real time.
About the Artist
Larry Sultan grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley, which became a source of inspiration for a number of his projects. His work blends documentary and staged photography to create images of the psychological as well as physical landscape of suburban family life. Sultan’s pioneering book and exhibition Pictures From Home (1992) was a decade long project that features his own mother and father as its primary subjects, exploring photography’s role in creating familial mythologies. Using this same suburban setting, his book, The Valley (2004) examined the adult film industry and the area’s middle-class tract homes that serve as pornographic film sets. Katherine Avenue, (2010) the exhibition and book, explored Sultan’s three main series, Pictures From Home, The Valley, and Homeland along side each other to further examine how Sultan’s images negotiate between reality and fantasy, domesticity and desire, as the mundane qualities of the domestic surroundings become loaded cultural symbols. In 2012, the monograph, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel was published to examine in depth the thirty plus year collaboration between these artists as they tackled numerous conceptual projects together that includes Billboards, How to Read Music In One Evening, Newsroom, and the seminal photography book Evidence, a collection of found institutional photographs, first published in 1977.
Larry Sultan’s work has been exhibited and published widely and is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he was also recognized with the Bay Area Treasure Award in 2005. Sultan served as a Distinguished Professor of Photography at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946, Larry Sultan passed away at his home in Greenbrae, California in 2009.
Images by Larry Sultan
