Larry Sultan — Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings

The first book given over to Larry Sultan's writing, a side of his work less well known than his photographs.

The texts come from the journals and notebooks Sultan kept, and many are printed here for the first time: notes on teaching and his own practice, drafts of short stories, records of dreams and finished essays. Passages from his public lectures and interviews run between them and bear on the ideas behind the series he is best known for, Pictures from Home, The Valley and Evidence, the last made with Mike Mandel. Water recurs through the writing, as subject and as metaphor, and the title comes from an early draft for Pictures from Home about beginning a new project.

The book is illustrated with archive material not seen before: annotated contact sheets, outtakes, scouting pictures, found photographs he collected, and layouts from the maquettes he made for his books. Among the documents is a 1969 letter to a local board of the Selective Service System, arguing that he should not be drafted during the Vietnam War.

Sultan was born in Brooklyn in 1946 and died in 2009. He was on the faculty of the San Francisco Art Institute, then spent twenty years teaching at California College of the Arts.

MACK, 2026. 320 pages, debossed flexibound, 17 x 23 cm.