Larry Sultan grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley, which became a source of inspiration for a number of his projects. His work blends documentary and staged photography to create images of the psychological as well as physical landscape of suburban family life. Whilst looking through Sultans website I noticed that he wrote a couple of paragraphs about each of his exhibitions. I really like his style of writing because I think it is very poetic and creative. Below I have included some of my favorite quotes of his and my favorite photos from of each of his shoots. Some of Sultan’s exhibitions consist of;

• Pictures From Home (1992)This project was ongoing for over a decade. Sultan photographed his own parents in their hometown, California and them in their day to day lives.

“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 dark.  It was a magical time that the house was mine.”

• The Valley (2004) examined the adult film industry and the area’s middle-class tract homes that serve as pornographic film sets.

“While the film crew and talent are hard at work in the living room, I wander through the house peering into the lives of the people who live there. I feel like a forensic photographer searching out evidence.”

• Hometown (2009) In this project Sultan is photographing men who work in labour, and is photographing them in some of the suburban landscapes.

“I’m not sure if there is a specific term for these places. They are deeply reminiscent of the terrain I sought out as a child: the empty fields behind malls and scruffy borderlands of the LA river that ran behind my house in the San Fernando Valley. These places represented a small and vanishing patch of paradise that existed just outside of the boundaries of property and ownership; a free zone that eased my (adolescent) uncertainty and provided a safe place away from the judgments of others.”

• Katherine Avenue, (2010) the exhibition and book, explored Sultan’s three main series, Pictures From Home, The Valley, and Homeland along side each other to further examine how Sultan’s images negotiate between reality and fantasy, domesticity and desire, as the mundane qualities of the domestic surroundings become loaded cultural symbols.

I really like Sultan’s work. I like way he captures his images in a more abstract way. Researching his work has given me an inspiration with my own work, and I think I will include Larry Sultan as a piece of research in my essay.

“a large- scale, federally funded propaganda machine”

The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was Initially created as the Resettlement Administration (RA) in 1935 as part of the New Deal in the United States, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) was an effort during the Depression to combat American rural poverty.

When Dorothea Lange took the photographs of Migrant Mother she was working for a FSA on a  project to capture photographs of the effects of the Great Depression. Roy Stryker was the director of this project. He lay down specifics of religion, social environments and activities he wanted to be captured when making assignments. He further indicated what type of expression he wanted to be captured which now is what we think is behind the photograph.

Propaganda is the formation, of photographs or other sources of information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. Some people argue that the photograph of Migrant Mother was used as propaganda to raise awareness of the 1930’s in a specific point of view, that is of the depression and poverty. The photograph is of a mother and her children which everyone can relate to and creates a lot of empathy from the viewers. The photos were also used to raise money, however none of that money was given to Migrant Mother herself, however some money was raised and given to the people on the crop farm where the photograph was originally taken. The photographs were then appropriated on to many things such as stamps and it soon became the most reproduced photograph in the history of photography.

Social reform is a kind of social movement that aims to make gradual change, or change in certain aspects of society, rather than rapid or fundamental changes. A reform movement is distinguished from more radical social movements such as revolutionary movements.  A Danish migrant published a photo book called ‘ How The Other Half Lives’  which was about the slums of Manhattan. This then triggered photographers such as Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange to document through photographs industrialization of American Working class families. This brought to the attention the need housing and labor reforms. This photographs then led to what we know now as photojournalism and documentary photography which is used to tell stories, raise awareness and document events.

For this i went around to boys and girls and asked them different questions about why they joined the gym and about why some of the boys go to the gym, i also asked some girls also because i though it would be quite interesting to see why girls go to the gym in comparison to boys. All of the people that i asked where from the ages of 17-18 and go to the gym regularly.

• Why do you go to the gym?

Boys – to build muscle/put on weight, social/see friends/interact with others, impress girls

Girls – to tone, loose weight

• Why did you begin to go to the gym in the first place?

Boys – because they were scrawny and wanted to put on weight/muscle, social, because all friends went so they felt they were out of place if they did not go, impress girls

Girls – loose weight/ tone

• What motivates you to go to the gym?

Boys – seeing other men/body builders who are muscly

Girls – to look better/model, to get into clothes that they want to wear

• If you were offered performance enhances would you take them? if answers yes/no why?

Boys – most boys said no, they said this because they said it would shrink their balls/penis, one of the boys said they would take a full cycle to get themselves into the momentum to work out harder and give them more strength but then they would not carry it on, another boy said that they would if they were offered them free as it would help them lift heavier, and put on more muscle

Girls – no, unless it would help them loose weight/get toned faster

• What do you think peoples perceptions of you are?

Boys – lad, muscly, gym addict, always goes to the gym 

Girls – fat, round ball, small, slim

• Find a picture online of what you want to look like at the end of your ‘fitness journey’ 

I think that from asking these questions the main thing that i found out was that the main reason boys go to the gym is to build muscle and to look bigger, or to get the perfect six pack that they see loads of other males/body builders have that they would want to look like. It was also interesting to see the comparison between the girls who go to the gym, the main difference was that boys go to the gym to put on weight whereas girls go to loose weight as they believe they are fat and also go because they want to tone up. 

” In an era of face recognition software and data sharing between governments and corporations , the only way to protect your identity, and hence your privacy, may be to destroy all pictures of yourself” – Paul Wombell

Defacing portraits in contemporary photography

The human brain is not too good at remembering faces, where as a computer helped by photography can store all data and make links between different locations and time zones. With a set of numbers a face can be recognized. Facebook is taking this project further, with a face recognition software called DeepFace which is almost as accurate as the human brain when it comes to recognizing faces. In the UK a system run by the government communication head quarters can access photographs on social media sites, emails and texts for facial recognition purposes.

Reasons why you might want to hide your face?

• Modesty
• Criminality
• Protection
• To Evade security cameras
• When taking part in a public demonstration
• Privacy
• Combat surveillance

Does face recognition come with power?

If personal photographs on social media and surveillance cameras are accessible not only to your friends and family but also to the government and operations. Can power be defined by how much data can be traced through facial recognition. More recently we have seen an example of this when technology was used to recognize the thousands of refugees travelling from the Middle East to Europe.

In my personal study I have chosen to obscure my mums face with objects and make her identity unknown until the end of the project.  I chose to this because I think it links in with her job title, as a domestic I think my mum’s work is in the background and not taken much notice of. I represented this in my photographs by ‘hiding’ her face with an object. When I first started photographing I did this unconsciously, it was only when I looked back at the photographs that I realized and carried on with this idea.

Possible facts to use in personal study essay:

• Statistically, the Portuguese are the 3^rd most hard working nation on average working nine hours per day.
• A study was carried out by the University of Southampton showed that the Portuguese immigrants in Jersey who  first began as farm workers are more able to become successful business-owners without learning very much of the language.
• According to the States statistics unit there were 5,500 people in Jersey last year who were either born in Portugal or Madeira.
• On average one Portuguese worker works about 1,852 hours per year.
• Portugal was also among the five biggest foreign working communities in Britain.

Photography: A Critical Introduction Third Edition Edited by Liz Wells 

In 1939 a Documentary photographer called Dorothea Lange, was working on a government run project called Farm Security Administration.  Dorothea had stopped on the road to investigate a group of people who were employed to pick peas. Within less than 15 minutes she had photographs of the ‘migrant mother’ and her children. This photograph went on to become the most reproduced photograph in history, it was reproduced on stamps to represent the ear of 1930’s and used for cartoons.

One of the main principles of this photograph was that it should remain untouched free of photo shop even any minor changes so that the photograph could maintain it’s accuracy and genuineness.

What the photograph shows/ represents?

• Mother and child – maternal symbolism
• Poverty during the depression
• Lack of presence in the mothers expression
• Absence of the farther
• The human condition at the time
• Social and historical evidence
• Resistance against the depression
• Gender roles – femininity

Dorothea Lange – The Assignment I Will Never Forget  

Essay to go with the photograph of Migrant Mother

“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, she was thirty-two. “She and her children had been living on frozen vegetables from the field and wild birds the children caught. The pea crop had frozen; there was no work. Yet they could not move on, for she had just sold the tires from the car to buy food. There she sat in that lean in tent with her children huddled around her, seemed to know that my pictures might help her, so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”

Ways in which the photograph can be analysed:

• Relation to politics and ideology
• Process and technique
• Class, race and gender
• Psychoanalysis
• Aesthetics and traditions in art
• Context
• Essay to go with it

In 1978,  they were able to track Migrant Mother, they found her living in a trailer in Modesto California, however they said that she was an ordinary dull woman who was no longer able to be the icon of the depression.  In an interview with ‘Migrant Mother’ Florence Thompson held by the United Press 50 years after the photographs were taken Florence said that she was proud to be the subject of the photography however she didn’t make any money out of it and so it had done her no good.