Larry sultan

I'm a little slow with the blogging lately, but here's a link to a nice interview with Larry Sultan in BR&S.

Sultan spoke at MassArt last week to a smallish but really appreciative crowd.  He spoke and answered questions for  quite a long time, and seemed extremely candid and honest about his work and his opinions on the art world (and its intersection with the commercial world).  

I really enjoyed the lecture, particularly because Sultan showed unpublished work from many years ago.  He also went into detail about the process for conceiving and creating Evidence with Mike Mandel; the book is a perfectly sequenced collection of found institutional and 'scientific' photographs. Sultan, as an artist who has worked in other media as well (painting, installation), also discussed the limitations of photography and his own influence by painting. From the BR&S interview:

"Part of the difficulty for me is that the subject that I've photographed has accumulated a history, whether it's pornography, or parents, or immigrants. Those subjects are spoken through our assumptions and our history with that cultural phenomenon. So to find a new discursive space, a space to wander around those subject matters, is a real challenge."