Review of Larry Sultan's "Pictures from Home"

A reflection on the Greatest Generation through the eyes of the Baby Boomers

Content Warning: Swearing

I’m here to defend the Boomers. They get a lot of hate and they did a lot, and I mean a lot, wrong. They did it for a reason though. They watched their own parents, the Greatest Generation, and the Greatest Generation had problems. I think Larry Sultan, a Boomer photographer and instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute, captured it best though.

Forget trying to think about this piece, I want you to feel it. Catch the vibe. Our mind is more often a slave to our passions than we care to admit; I’m trying to get you to feel this one.

Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home is a collection of photos taken in the late 80s of his Greatest Generation parents. In his own words:

“These are my parents.  From that simple fact, everything follows.  I realize that beyond the rolls of film and the few good pictures, the demands of my project and my confusion about its meaning, is the wish to take photography literally.  To stop time.  I want my parents to live forever.”

I bet a lot of Millennials and Gen Xers can sympathize with that right now.

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This is fundamentally how Larry Sultan saw his parents and the Greatest Generation as a whole: hidden, hidden insecurity, hidden fear. His dad looks great, he’s trying to communicate that whole Drucker/Covey style of leadership. And Sultan catches the uncertainty underneath the suit.

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Everything looks fine, better than today, but underneath there’s these little signs, these little hints of trouble. Everything was buried. Every problem was buried.

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Those eyes, man, those eyes always fucking get me. Those are eyes that have seen some shit. Those are eyes with pain and heartache and hurt, all covered up. That woman puts on makeup like a suit of armor. Just look at those eyes.

And it always kills me that Sultan choose this. This is his goddamn mother and this is how he captured her, this is how he saved her for posterity. He’s sitting at home, face-to-face with his parents’ own mortality, trying desperately to capture them, immortalize them, one last conversation, and this is what he chose. He looked at his own mother, death standing off camera, and this is what he genuinely, truly saw. Hidden pain. His own goddamn mother.

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Empty house. Sucks. Greedy fucking Boomers will never sell their houses but then you’re standing in an empty house, the house you raised your children in, your home, and then it’s an empty fucking pile of sticks for someone else to move into.

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Makes sense. We see the 50s as a halcyon day to return, the good old days. And they were, make no mistake, we’ve lost a lot. But these are Depression babies. WWII soldiers. They saw some shit. Everything from 1929 to 1946 is a shitty fucking time: poverty, war, and death. If anybody had scars, if anybody had trauma, it was these guys. Born into real poverty, real poverty by even 19^th century standards, followed by the bloodiest global conflict in history.  All the peace and prosperity of the 50s, the whole “Leave it to Beaver” thing, just a generation of traumatized young adults putting pretty makeup over their scars.

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And you can hide stuff from kids but not stuff this big. The Boomers figured it out. They figured out something. The whole 60s counter-culture makes a lot more sense as the rebellion of children who couldn’t quite figure out what happened but knew that Mom & Dad were putting on a brave face, that something else was going on.

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All gone now. Forgotten scar tissue. Grandma and Grandpa passed away a long time ago. Soon the Boomers too. And don’t make any mistakes here, this isn’t the story of who the Greatest Generation was, this is the story of how the Boomers saw them. How the Boomer’s own parents affected them. Never forget that these are curated photos, a curated portrayal, one Larry Sultan cultivated and immortalized of his own parents, not one they agreed with.

You can buy “Pictures from Home” on Amazon but it’s $60 and you can see the pictures here (https://www.larrysultan.com/gallery/pictures-from-home/). It’s worth spending a bit of time. There’s also a theatrical production that’s run on and off Broadway for awhile now and I highly recommend it if you get the opportunity. As you can probably tell, it’s stuck with me awhile.