The Valley — Larry Sultan (2004)

This is Larry Sultan’s The Valley, a book that took five years to shoot and a lifetime of visual intelligence to frame. Published in 2004 by Scalo, it captures a strange and distinctly American intersection of domesticity and performance — the San Fernando Valley, epicentre of the adult film industry, rendered not as spectacle, but as a liminal theatre of longing, boredom, power, and collapse. Working with large format, Sultan inserts himself into the private homes used as film sets, portraying moments in-between takes or fully staged with deliberate ambiguity. The result is disquieting: bathrobes, fake tears, boom mics, indifferent husbands, nude actors caught under bright domestic lighting — the unglamorous infrastructure of desire.

Each photograph is lush, exacting, and mournful. Sultan’s palette leans toward deep velvet purples, beige carpets, overlit flesh and faux-wood panelling. If Araki gives us erotic ruin and Moriyama the grain of hunger, Sultan gives us stasis — desire without climax, where everything feels both overexposed and drained. This is California, but not as fantasy: it’s the Valley as stage, memory, and prison. Sultan, who grew up in the Valley and previously photographed his own parents with similar tenderness and unease (Pictures from Home), extends his project of familial estrangement into a more public theatre. A book for anyone tracking the blurred borders of performance, the machinery of sex, and the deathless ache of suburban light.

Technical Sheet
Title: The Valley
Artist / Author: Larry Sultan
Date: 2004
Technique / Printing Method: Offset printing
Medium / Materials: Hardcover with dust jacket
Dimensions: 30.5 × 34 cm
Pages: 128
Publisher / Editor: Scalo
ISBN: 3-908247-79-9
Condition: Used. Good condition