Pictures from Home — Larry Sultan (2021 MACK edition)

This is the 2021 second edition of Pictures from Home by Larry Sultan, published by MACK, nearly three decades after its original release in 1992. A landmark photobook in the tradition of personal documentary, it records the artist’s prolonged, intimate observation of his own parents in their California home, fusing suburban banality with psychological complexity. Sultan’s parents are rendered not as archetypes, but as collaborators in a long domestic performance — post-war optimism, retirement disillusionment, the American Dream both achieved and unraveling.

The book blends photography with Sultan’s own writings, home movie stills, and archival images, layering time and perspective. His father appears buttoned-up, restrained; his mother more theatrical. The visual rhythm is slow, even tender — but not nostalgic. Sultan turns the Californian light onto middle-class performance, surveillance, and aging.

This edition is adapted by Michael Mack and Lewis Chaplin and remains faithful to Sultan’s original layout, while asserting a renewed relevance in an age saturated by self-image. Its presence in Darwin sits alongside other works that interrogate the familial and the photographic — Elinor Carucci, Leigh Ledare — but Sultan’s tone is subtler, more formally reserved, and conceptually grounded in the critique of photography itself.

Technical Sheet

Title: Pictures from Home
Artist / Author: Larry Sultan
Date: Originally 1992; this edition 2021 (second printing)
Technique / Printing Method: Offset
Medium / Materials: Hardcover
Dimensions (cm): approx. 27 x 25 cm
Language: English
Pages: Unstated
Publisher / Editor: MACK
ISBN: 9781910164785
Condition: NEW