A New Book Offers an Intimate Peek at Photographer Larry Sultan’s Psyche

Larry Sultan has long been celebrated as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century. But a new book from MACK, Water Over Thunder, reveals that writing was never secondary to his image-making practice—it was foundational. According to his family and stewards of the California native’s estate and archive, writing, teaching—which Sultan did at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1978 to 1988 and at the California College of the Arts—and shooting were not separate disciplines, but “an integrated pursuit.”

This integration can be traced back to Sultan’s earliest collaborations, like Evidence, which he made with Mike Mandel. In the work—which featured a collection of found photographs in corporate and government archives—images were stripped of captions and institutional context, and resequenced without explanation. The removal of words became as conceptually charged as their presence elsewhere in Sultan’s work. In Pictures From Home, text re-entered the frame in a deeply personal way—letters, transcripts, reflections—forming what his family describes as “another kind of collaboration,” this time with his parents. Writing there did not explain the photographs, it destabilized them, collapsing the distance between photographer and subject. Sultan was never interested in standing outside his material. He wanted to exist within it.

Water Over Thunder makes this porousness visible. The selected journals, lectures, dream fragments, and essays, many unpublished until now, show Sultan using writing as a method of thinking through confusion. As his son, Maxwell Sultan, says, the writing helped him “have conversations with himself.”

Sultan was both intensely driven and profoundly doubtful, and his notebooks track that tension in real time. This ethos shaped not only his art, but his teaching. “I consider students fellow travelers,” Sultan wrote. “The idea of identity, ‘artist’ as conditional, conferred by evaluation, based on a criteria outside of oneself can only lead to conformity and the stifling of the creative spirit.” This passage clarifies what the book confirms: Sultan did not position himself as an authority dispensing answers. He modeled vulnerability. He brought unfinished work into the classroom. He invited critique of his own photographs with the same seriousness he applied to his students’. Sultan also valued humor and pure fun. His class assignments and field trips often wandered far from strict photography—think ballroom dance lessons, trips to the racetrack, a magic show, or behind-the-scenes at the Natural History Museum.

The book’s title stems from an early draft of Pictures from Home, where Sultan describes beginning a project as a state in which “everything is in motion…it seems impossible to find a break in the surface.” His family reflects on this “break” as that testing period—when something feels charged, but unproven, when a project might be abandoned or might deepen. Writing was often the place where that uncertainty was metabolized. It was where he tracked his fear, ambition, boredom, attraction: the internal tempest of creation.

Importantly, the materials reproduced in Water Over Thunder—contact sheets, outtakes, annotated layouts, book maquettes—show how constructed even his most intimate images were. Assistants recall how, even on commissioned editorial shoots, Sultan would build a frame meticulously—adjusting lighting, repositioning figures, refining the scene through Polaroids before committing to the final exposure. Yet he often sequenced photographs in ways that preserved confusion rather than smoothing it out.

As his family notes, he could have edited to appear more coherent, more certain—but chose not to. That willingness to leave the seams visible parallels the book’s structure itself: chapters meander, sections can be entered at random, meanings shift depending on where one begins.

What emerges is a portrait of an artist who understood performance—within the family, on a porn set in The Valley, or in the classroom—not as artifice alone, but as a shared act of meaning-making.

For younger artists and writers, the gift of Water Over Thunder may be precisely this transparency. The book does not offer a formula. It reveals a kind of life process: teetering between drive and doubt, the necessity of failure, the value of sitting with a question before rushing to name it. It shows that a practice is not only the finished work but the thinking around it. All of the private grappling, the aborted attempts, and the rewritten passages no one was meant to see.

“I know I change all the time,” Sultan scrawled.