A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words: Photo Analysis Essay

Several photographers have photographed home and family life. Their styles range from the cinematic, staged, conceptual views of home, like Gregory Crewdson's 'Cathedral of the Pines' (2014) and Philip-Lorca diCorcia's 'Brian in the Kitchen' (1988), Tina Barney's family snapshots 'Theatre of Manners' (1997), showing the life of wealthy Americans, in an intimate, informal way, through to Richard Billingham's 'Ray's a Laugh' (2000), which documents a raw, chaotic image of his family life in a flat in the Midlands, using a simple point and shoot film camera.

Larry Sultan's pictures were partly influenced by what he felt was the Reagan administration hijacking the family unit, trying to use it as an ideological tool, with white middle-class families being held up as the norm to aspire to, something he found offensive. But principally, as a response to his own complicated family life, it was an attempt to reshape his family history into something that would be more acceptable to him, to re-position himself within the family.

Many of his pictures were staged or directed, he felt that this was a valid method to explore truth, “how we perform. . . truth can be staged, and it can be found” (Sultan, s.d.). 'Pictures from Home' is a mixture of found images and stills from family films combined with his own photographs. The stills and album photographs show a typical blissful and joyful period which was different from Sultan's memories. His photographs are directed performances to articulate his 'truth', an attempt to 'find himself', and to represent his familial memories.

'Dad on Bed' is an 'interpretative' portrait that he presents to the viewer as his 'truth' regarding his father, however, this interpreted truth is 'non-falsifiable' (Barrett, 1980). His staged scene is constructed from the three-way relationship between the Operator (photographer), Spectator (viewer), and Spectrum subject (Dad).

Considering the technical codes, this portrait is taken from the front, straight on, using a 'medium format film' camera (Collins, 2011). The light is natural and is coming from the camera's right. There is a window behind his father, the light from which washes across the back wall, lightening it, isolating his father from the background. There is also light that illuminates his father from the front, in a soft and natural way with gentle shadows, this would indicate another natural light source, probably another window, camera right and in front of his father. Regarding location, it is a bedroom, clearly denoted by the bed and clothes, which appear to be dressing gowns hanging on a stand at the back of the room. The walls are papered with a strong geometrically patterned wallpaper, typical of the 1980s. This is his parent's bedroom, there are framed caricature drawings on one of the walls, caricatures like this are often produced at business conventions, events, or at trade shows and are likely to be of his father.

Regarding cultural codes, his father is seated on the side of the bed, dressed in a dark blue business-style suit with a white shirt and a necktie. Neckties are not so common now, but in the 1980s they were, particularly among more senior management where they could signify office, position, or authority. His shoes are highly polished black ones, the outfit might be considered somewhat incongruous for a bedroom setting, but typically this is a businessman's uniform.

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His gaze is not directly at the camera lens but instead somewhere off into the distance to the right of the camera, his hands are in front of him and resting on the bed between his legs, his fingers are interlaced, which introduces a slight tension into the photograph. Fingers of hands interlaced in front of a person in this way indicates “self-restraint withholding a negative reaction... usually anxiety or frustration” (Parvez, 2015). This perhaps indicates a tension between Sultan and his father. These codes “work together... into the rhetorical argument of the portrait” (Bate, 2016:98).

I find the 'punctum', the detail that pierces the image, “...revealed after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me...” (Barthes, 2000:53), is his father's facial expression. I see a slight malevolence, a reluctant compliance to a request from his son. Having said that, the fact that the image exists must indicate a degree of agreement and willingness to be photographed.

His father was a self-made businessman, an orphan from the lower classes who worked his way up to vice president for the Schick Safety Razor Company. The father's drive, ambition, and success may have been part of the reason he had a particularly difficult relationship with him. In an interview for the Oakland Museum of California, he said of his father: “...he was pissed that I was an artist and he always gave me a hard time. He called me a loser” (Sultan, s.d.). His father lost his job with Schick when he was in his early fifties and never worked again. He said that this caused a deep wound to the family. Perhaps his father felt a sense of personal failure, and to try to mitigate this feeling, he decided he would help his son with his photography.

This portrait was made after he had asked his father to dress up in his business clothes so that they could do a mock-up of a Dale Carnegie training session (Carnegie was a developer of corporate training programs); this moment was when his father sat down on the bed to rest.

By directing his father in this portrait, he is manipulating him, trying to make him as he sees him, and projecting his feelings for his father back onto him. Bate in his book 'Photography-The Key Concepts' when talking about seeing portraits discusses projection, “In 'projection' the viewer casts off uncomfortable feelings, relocates them within another person or thing” (Bate, 2020:103). His father's appraisal of him as a loser is being projected back onto his father who was now unemployed, the head of the family that has failed the American Dream of the Reagan era.

His father, who did not particularly like this photograph said about it: “I want you to know that I already know that that's you sitting on the bed, this is a self-portrait, I know who I am, and you know who you are, your values are part of this work but let's just make it very explicit, that's you sitting on the bed” (Sultan, 2018).

When interviewed by Catherine Liu for BOMB Magazine, Sultan said: “Originally my interest was to deal with the male, the male vision of success and career” (Sultan, 1990). In this picture, his father is dressed up in his business suit but with nowhere to go. I think this portrayal of his father works on two counts. First, it shows a male career failure, a failure of that American Dream, and secondly, given the context of the history of his relationship with his father, the portrait also becomes a reflection of the photographer, in effect a self-portrait.