Blog Archives

Homeland

Posted on by paul

For the past two years, I have been hiring day laborers as actors in the landscape photographs I make on the outskirts of the suburbs. I drive to lumber yards and big box hardware stores where, every day, from dawn to early evening, hundreds of men wait nearby to be picked up for hourly work. […]

Pictures From Home

Posted on by paul

The house is quiet.  They have gone to bed, leaving me alone, and the electric timer has just switched off the living-room lights.  It feels like the house has finally turned on its side to fall asleep.  Years ago I would have gone through my mother’s purse for one of her cigarettes and smoked in […]

The Valley

Posted on by paul

The cast and crew have gathered in the front yard of a ranch-style house, a few blocks from where I went to high school in the San Fernando Valley. Women in six-inch heels sink into the lawn; men push around camera equipment, anxious about losing the light. They are preparing to film a scene in […]

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace

Posted on by paul

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace, appeared in Blind Spot, Issue #5, in 1995.

Home Movie Stills

Posted on by paul

UNTITLED HOME MOVIE STILLS: We all have our ritual snapshots. These are very precious things that constitute a personal archive. Photography allows you to carry a trace of the past with you. With movie stills, the event has been distilled into myth. I would imagine that’s why it looks like everybody else’s past. While my […]

San Francisco Society

Posted on by paul

San Francisco Society first appeared as a photo essay for the article Pacific Heights, by Kevin West, that appeared as a W Magazine Feature in January of 2007. A portfolio was created for the project in 2009.    

Swimmers

Posted on by paul

“Between 1978 and 1982 I photographed people leaning to swim in several pools in San Francisco. I was interested in making pictures that were excessively physical, sensual, and painterly. They were inspired by the Red Cross Swimming and life Saving Manuals and made with a small underwater camera. They were made at a time when […]

Editorial

Posted on by paul

Photographer: Larry Sultan Bill To: TBD Job Reference: TBD Cameras: 2 – Mamiya RZ camera bodies 2 – Mamiya RZ winders 1 – Mamiya RZ prism finders 3 – Mamiya RZ 220 film backs 1 – Mamiya RZ polaroid back 1 – Mamiya RZ 65mm lens 1 – Mamiya RZ 90mm lens 1 – Mamiya […]

Evidence

Posted on by paul

From 1975-1977, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel selected photographs from a multitude of images that previously existed solely within the boundaries of the industrial, scientific, governmental and other institutional sources from which they were mined.  The project, “Evidence”, was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was one of the […]

Billboards

Posted on by paul

Beginning in 1973 and up until 1989, we worked together on open ended, allusive designs for outdoor advertising billboards, under the name Clatworthy Colorvues. The billboards were exhibited mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we lived, but sometimes installed in other parts of the country, the result of workshops we led with graduate […]

Public

Posted on by paul

Newsroom

Posted on by paul

Newsroom An except from an essay by Constance M. Lewallen written in 2009 Newsroom was the culmination of Mandel and Sultan’s collaborative projects dealing with mass media imagery. They approached it as a workshop, an evolving exhibition, in which they hoped to learn as well as present facts about the methods of news media and […]

Trouble Spots

Posted on by paul

For a ten day residency at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, we brought with us a fifties book of religious imagery, Your Bible and You. Inside were all these beaming faces looking heavenward. Russia, a typeface as seen by Joe McCarthy; is it the socialist worker’s paradise? A fifties rat-hole Stalin gulag? An eighties […]

MALL: YOU ARE HERE

Posted on by paul

Ice Skaters

Posted on by paul

SFO

Posted on by paul

How to Read Music in One Evening

Posted on by paul

In 1974, Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, produced their first collaborative book, How to Read Music in One Evening, A Clatworthy Catalog. This comprised a series of drawings and rather lowbrow photographic illustrations lifted from cheap ads or instructional manuals: the sort you would find on the back of comic books or inside matchbooks or […]