|Casemore Gallery and Yancey Richardson partner at Frieze LA, where they will present a solo booth of works from Larry Sultan’s iconic photo series The Valley (1998–2003). A seminal meditation on the actors, crews and built environment of the adult film industry in California’s San Fernando Valley during the 1990s and 2000s, the series has become an essential body of work on suburbia. It reveals a place and time when aspiring film stars, sex work and bucolic domesticity discreetly coexisted in Los Angeles County, and engenders a broader understanding of the elasticity of the ‘American Dream.’ This will be the first time the work has been seen in the Los Angeles area since Sultan’s 2014 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Having grown up in the San Fernando Valley, Sultan made that expanse of land and suburban development one of his recurring subjects, treating it as a wellspring of inspiration and a source of insight into the social life of America. Sultan’s photographs toggle between documentary, re-staging the spontaneous and pure construction to explore the psychological nuances of suburban life and charge the architecture of domestic space—so familiar that it is often overlooked—revealing a complex current of feeling, belief and experience ebbing just beneath the surface.
In The Valley, Sultan once again looked at the neighborhoods and homes he knew from his childhood, but this time as living backdrops for the adult film industry.
Rented for the two or three days needed to make a film, the subjects of Sultan’s photographs become these suburban interiors with their personal touches and backyards full of lawn furniture as the uncanny foil for the fantasies and desires of an alternate family of cast and crew temporarily in residence. The viewer is rewarded for patiently exploring the banality of the domestic space as the main protagonist while Sultan works around the obvious action to find moments of connection within the mundane and the unexpected. As Sultan observed, “…by photographing this I’m planted squarely in the terrain of my own ambivalence—that rich and fertile field that stretches out between fascination and repulsion, desire and loss. I’m home again.”
About Larry Sultan
Larry Sultan (American photographer, b. Brooklyn, NY, 1946; d. Greenbrae, CA, 2009) was raised in California’s San Fernando Valley. His work, heavily influenced by the post-war popular culture of Los Angeles, plays with notions of documentary and staged photography and reveals the psychological nuances found in the everyday suburban landscape and family life. Acclaimed for his use of color and light, Sultan is also known for uniquely collapsing the distance between himself and his subject. His series include Swimmers (1978-82), Pictures from Home (1983-92), The Valley (2004) and Homeland (2006-2009). Sultan co-authored the ground-breaking work, Evidence (1977) with Mike Mandel. A beloved and highly influential educator, Sultan taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1978 to 1988 and served as a Distinguished Professor of Photography at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, from 1989 to 2009.
Sultan’s work has been widely published, exhibited, and collected worldwide including Tate Modern, London; The National Gallery, London; Stedejik Museum, Amsterdam; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, NY; Los Angeles County San Francisco Museum of Art, CA; Art Institute of Chicago, IL. Sultan was the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, US Department of International Arts and Lectures Grant, National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowship. Sultan’s project Pictures from Home was developed for the stage and premiered on Broadway in 2023.
Zach Ritter
Frieze LA 2026
Booth A27
February 26–March 1, 2026
VIP Opening February 26, 2026
https://www.frieze.com/fairs/frieze-los-angeles
Yancey Richardson
525 W 22nd St
New York, NY 10011
https://www.yanceyrichardson.com/
Casemore Gallery
1275 Minnesota St #102
San Francisco, CA 94107
https://casemoregallery.com/
