Pictures from Home

The house is silent. They have gone to bed, leaving me alone, and the electric timer has just turned off the living room lights. It feels as if the house has finally turned on its side to go to sleep. Years ago I would have rummaged in my mother's purse for one of her cigarettes and smoked in the dark. It was a magical time when the house was mine.

Tonight, however, I am restless. I sit at the dining room table and rummage through the fridge. What am I looking for?

I've been rummaging all day, rummaging through rooms and closets, peeking through her things, studying them. I sort my rolls of exposed film into long rows and count and recount them as if they were missing. There are twenty-eight.

What drives me to continue this work is hard to name. It has more to do with love than sociology, with being a subject of the drama than a witness. And in the strange and confusing process of working everything changes; boundaries blur, my distance slips, arrogance and the illusion of immunity falters. I wake up in the middle of the night, dazed and distressed. These are my parents. From that simple fact everything follows. I realize that beyond the rolls of film and the few good photos, beyond the demands of my project and my confusion about its meaning, is the desire to take photography at face value. To stop time. I want my parents to live forever.

Larry Sultan: An excerpt from chapter one of Pictures From Home, 1992