"This is one of the most significant American photobooks of the 1990s." Parr + Badger Vol. II
"After his death, I reread Pictures From Home. Incredible. Has there ever been a photographer who writes better than Sultan? I am certain nobody has done a better job of combining text and images. In that respect, Pictures From Home is the absolute pinnacle. Simple, intelligent and brutally honest, it is a masterpiece of narrative photography." Alec Soth
"...one of the most moving and indelible family portraits I have ever read." Dave Eggers
"What is Pictures From Home? A memoir, a scrapbook, a cry of pain and an album of bitterly affectionate photographs. Larry Sultan's images and words were his reconciliation with the Oedipal tangle of the American Dream." David Campany
"One of the most remarkable things about Pictures from Home is how vulnerable Sultan allows himself to be in the text, confronting insecurities about himself and his work, brilliantly deconstructing the project and the challenges of making it. The book's narrative is profound and deeply moving, while its form breaks with precedent and challenges the constraints of any particular genre." Gregory Halpern
"The original edition of Pictures from Home was a groundbreaking work of art. This new edition is an even more intense and immersive experience." Stephen Shore
"In Pictures from Home, Larry Sultan created a brilliant, unprecedented dynamic between his photographs, words and editing of his parents' archive of film images and family photographs. All these elements compete for legitimacy and declare their fictions in their reanimation of memories, closely bound to the forensic scrutiny and adult responsibility he brought to this deeply personal history of 'home'." Charlotte Cotton
First published in 1992 to great critical acclaim, Pictures From Home is Larry Sultan's portrait of his parents. Sultan returned periodically to his Southern California home during the 1980s, and the decade-long sequence moves between registers, combining contemporary photographs with stills from home movies, fragments of conversation, Sultan's own writing and other memorabilia. The result is a narrative collage in which the boundary between documentary and staging becomes increasingly ambiguous. At the same time, the distance conventionally maintained between photographer and subject slips into an exchange of dialogue and emotion unique to this work.
Significantly increasing the original book's page count, MACK's design clarifies the multiplicity of voices, both textual and pictorial, to offer a fresh perspective on this seminal work. Emphasising the cinematic movement of the family's home movies, the Super-8 film stills have been newly digitised and enlarged, with selected scenes running full-bleed across double-page spreads. Meanwhile, Sultan's photographs of his parents' daily lives, against the quintessential backdrop of the Reagan-era American Dream, are supplemented by previously unpublished images. Above all, the book honours Sultan as the acclaimed "King of Colour Photography".
"What drives me to continue this work is difficult to name. It has more to do with love than sociology. With being a subject in the drama rather than a witness. And in the strange, confusing process of working, everything changes: boundaries blur, my distance slips, arrogance and the illusion of immunity falter. I wake in the middle of the night, dazed and distressed. These are my parents. Everything follows from that simple fact." — Larry Sultan
