EDITOR’S NOTE: In Snap, we look at the power of a single photograph, chronicling stories about how both modern and historical images have been made.
In a makeshift bedroom with vibrant purple curtains, the adult film actor Sharon Wild poses for a photograph between takes, sitting on a worn and dirty mattress, a diaphanous piece of pink fabric draped over the side where she sits. The dracaena tree in the corner is fake, and the rooms’ props — a single lamp, a brown suitcase on a rack — evoke the barest sense of setting and narrative.
It’s those mundane details of pornography sets, in both studios and rented homes across California’s San Fernando Valley, that intrigued the American photographer Larry Sultan. In the late 1990s, a shoot about the daily life of a porn star for the men’s magazine Maxim led Sultan, by chance, back to his childhood neighborhood in the Valley. The area had become a hub for adult film entertainment studios thanks to its relative affordability and proximity to nearby Los Angeles. Sultan returned for several years to photograph the homes rented out to adult film companies – settings which could arouse the fantasies of everyday life, as well as studio sets that hastily replicated scenes of American domesticity.
“It was like this parallel reality, and he was really fascinated by it,” Yancey Richardson, Sultan’s gallerist, explained by phone.
“The Valley” published as a book in 2004, and images from the series have regularly been included in exhibitions of the late photographer’s work. (Sultan died in 2009, from cancer.) His portrait of Wild is currently on view at Richardson’s eponymous gallery in New York for its 30th anniversary show.
In his book, Sultan wrote on the strangeness of the Valley’s homes temporarily annexed by adult entertainment, as if families had abandoned them suddenly overnight. The interiors and furnishings speak to a familiar domestic middle-class life — often reminding him of his own childhood — yet they had been “estranged” from their real purpose, he said, curated in service of the performance of pleasure and sex.
Sultan’s wife, Kelly, was on set during the fateful Maxim shoot. Over the phone, she recalled: “What was immediately of interest to him was the home itself: the magnets on the refrigerator; the details of daily life that were still alive in the home and being used as a backdrop for this alternative family that had moved in for the day.”
Throughout the images, the sex itself is relegated to the background, or hinted at with a wink and a nod: bodies are seen through windows and reflections, cropped out of frame, or comedically obscured by plants and furniture.
“(He was) looking for the details on the sets and in the homes for clues to excavate this interior psyche that that we all have,” said the photographer Rebecca Bausher, who was his assistant at the time. “We’d walk into a setting and there might be a sex scene already happening, like, off in a bedroom or off to the right. But he’d be like, ‘Oh my God, look at this menorah.’”
In homes, Sultan often sought out a sense of place and belonging, Bausher said. But in the production studios he photographed, the sets’ incongruities took center stage: curtains pushed back to reveal the set wall; living room furniture haphazardly assembled together, clothes strewn about; the illusion of a backdrop of a suburban street interrupted by the studio props. The portrait of Wild, who makes direct eye contact with the camera, is a rare moment when Sultan’s presence is acknowledged by the actors.
“I think of myself on porn sets as documenting fictions,” Sultan said in an interview with the Oakland Museum of Contemporary Art in 2003. “I like the theatrical lighting, I like their staging, I like that kind of weird theater, and yet what I’m doing is not making film stills, I’m making almost contra film stills. I’m making those moments that are off, where the drama isn’t being targeted right at that dramatic moment. It’s an anti-dramatic moment.”
In the same interview, he acknowledged the portrait of Wild, and the strange, constructed feel of the scene. “When I see some purple curtains, I run for my camera,” he said. “Give me purple curtains and a red suitcase and I’m in heaven!”