Product Description

In 1998, an English magazine asked me to go on a porn set. I flew down to Burbank Airport with my wife, and we went to the house theyd given me the address of. It was a dentists house on Van Alden. That name had all kinds of connotations when I was in high school. Because the Valley is so haunted for me by the ghosts of childhood, all of these street names have Proustian connotations. All I have to do is to say: Havenhurst, Van Alden, Vineta, Dubois, and a flood of associations comes back to me. […] After the first five minutes of the strangeness of it all, I started to look around, going to the bedrooms, wandering through the house. It felt like a permission to go into a house in LA and to imagine how someone would live their life in this house. I made the pictures for the magazine. I left and thought, This is it, this is what I have to do.Larry Sultan Since 1998, San Francisco-based Larry Sultan whose previous books Evidence (1977), with its pioneering use of found imagery, and Pictures from Home (1992), a seminal photographic investigation of suburban life, are now considered classics has returned time and again to porn sets in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles to create this dense series of photographs of middle-class homes invaded by the porn industry. But The Valley is by no means a documentary on porn filmmaking the lush and intricate images adroitly play with artifice and reality and add up to an elliptical narrative circling around the concepts of home and desire, their tense and intricate relation. These images of homes and gardens, porn actors and film crews, studio and location shootings are an ambiguous meditation on suburbia and its trappings, family and transgression, loss and desire, the utopias and dystopias of middle-class lifestyle.