"Photography and writing are not straightforward paths for Sultan. They unfold amidst doubts, detours, unexpected discoveries, and the continuous questioning of his practice. Hence the importance of accepting uncertainty, initial confusion, and the risk of shipwreck as a natural part of the process. It has a lot to do with failure, the author acknowledges."
"It was his attention to the everyday and the mundane that drew Sultan to photography. The medium offered him access to spaces of contemporary life that otherwise remained closed to him. For this young man, born in Brooklyn and raised in Los Angeles, his interest in visual culture lay not in museums, but in the billboards of the Sunset Strip."
"His correspondence with curators, his continuous notes in notebooks, transcripts of his classes, drafts of short stories, as well as the candid entries in his diaries, where dreams find a privileged place, alongside more polished essays, allow the reader to follow the artist's thoughts as he reflects on the act of seeing, family memory, and the limits of photography."
Water Over Thunder compiles the writings of photographer Larry Sultan, demonstrating that writing was fundamental to his artistic practice rather than supplementary. His texts include correspondence with curators, notebook entries, class transcripts, diary entries featuring dreams, and essays exploring the act of seeing, family memory, and photography's boundaries. Sultan approached photography and writing as uncertain navigations filled with doubts and detours, viewing failure as natural to creative process. His interest in everyday subjects and contemporary visual culture, particularly billboards rather than museum art, shaped his practice. He rejected academic art criticism and romantic notions of the bohemian artist. This perspective informed his collaboration with Mike Mandel on Evidence, a conceptual photography publication that questioned photography's claim to objective truth.
#larry-sultan #photography-and-writing #conceptual-photography #artistic-practice #contemporary-visual-culture
Read at english.elpais.com
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