Book Event —Larry Sultan "Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings”

This event is sold out. Walk-ins with museum admission ticket are allowed within capacity.

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 readings by Susan Meiselas, Jason Fulford, Jonathan Lethem, Rebecca Bengal, and Tamara Jenkins, moderated by Philip Gefter. 

This program is offered in person at ICP on New York City’s Lower East Side. 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 The selected texts – many unpublished until now – come from Sultan’s numerous journals and notebooks, encompassing reflections on his teaching and art practice, drafts for short stories, vivid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.

Rebecca Bengal is the author of Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists, published by Aperture with a foreword by Joy Williams. Her short fiction, essays, interviews, and journalism have been published in numerous magazines, journals, and newspapers, including a story in collaboration with Alec Soth about Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home, for The New York Times. She is a contributing editor at Oxford American, a former editor at American Short Fiction and Vogue, and an alum of both The Onion and DoubleTake. Among her collaborations with photographers are short stories for Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures, Kristine Potter’s Dark Waters, and Carolyn Drake’s Knit Club, as well as essays for Paul Graham’s But Still It Turns and reporting from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation with Alessandra Sanguinetti and with Mitch Epstein. Originally from western North Carolina by way of Austin, Texas, she lives in New York City and teaches writing in the Bard Photography Program. She is at work on a novel and stories, and a book about film, music, photography, catastrophe, language, and time.

Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer and has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1976. She has authored and edited eleven books, including Carnival Strippers, Nicaragua and Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History and co-directed three films. Meiselas is well known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Her photographs are included in American and international collections.  She has served as the President of the Magnum Foundation since its inception in 2007. The Magnum Foundation supports the next generation of in-depth documentary photographers.
 

Philip Gefter is the author of Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Bloomsbury); two biographies: What Becomes a Legend Most: The Biography of Richard Avedon (Harper); Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe (Norton/Liveright), for which he received the 2014 Marfield Prize, the national award for arts writing; and a collection of essays, Photography After Frank (Aperture). He was on staff at the New York Times for over fifteen years as the page one picture editor, the picture editor for culture, and as a photography critic for the paper. He produced the 2011 documentary, Bill Cunningham New York. He lives in New York City.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of Brooklyn Crime Novel, Chronic City, and eleven other novels. His art writing was collected in Cellophane Bricks (Ze Books) in 2024.

Jason Fulford is a photographer and co-founder of J&L Books. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a frequent lecturer at universities, and has led workshops across the globe. Fulford’s photographs have been described as open metaphors; as an editor and an author, a focus of his work has been how meaning is generated through association. His monographs include Sunbird (2000), Crushed (2003), Raising Frogs for $$$ (2006), The Mushroom Collector (2010), Hotel Oracle (2013), Contains: 3 Books (2016), Clayton’s Ascent(2018),The Medium is aMess(2018),Picture Summer on Kodak Film(2020), and The Heart Is a Sandwich (2023). He is co-author with Tamara Shopsin of the photobook for children This Equals That (2014),co-editor with Gregory Halpern of The Photographer’s Playbook (2014), guest editor of Der Greif Issue 11, editor of Photo No-Nos (2021), co-editor with Julie Ault and Jordan Weitzman of Ordinary Things Will Be Signs For Us: Photographs by Corita (2023), and editor of Bruno Munari 47 Fotos (2024).

Tamara Jenkins is the writer and director of the films Private Life, The Savages, and Slums of Beverly Hills as well as several award-winning shorts. Her work has screened at the New York Film Festival, Telluride, Cannes, Sundance, and MoMA. She is the recipient of an Academy Award nomination, an Independent Spirit Award, a Los Angeles Film Critics prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Images by Larry Sultan