Artist: Larry Sultan
Date: 2004
Title: Photo from The Valley Series
The Valley is a series of documentary style photos taken by Larry Sultan depicting the downtime of pornographic film shoots in California. In 2004 the series was published in his book titled The Valley. I believe Sultans objective was to capture a less obvious but interesting side to the pornographic industry. The images show actors, actresses, and crew taking breaks in between filming, which exposes a realism we otherwise wouldn't see about this industry. The photo above is one of my favorites in this series because of the information captured. We are shown two different aspects of a pornographic film shoot: to the right of the image we are shown a glimpse of the crew during filming, while at the same time experiencing the casual nature of these shoots by the naked woman on a break to the left of the image.
There are also some interesting relationships between the different gazes of the people - the men are all looking in 1 direction (probably where the action is) and the woman is turned away from us. You commented on the mundane nature of this scene - and the composition seems to mirror that idea, appearing almost as a snapshot.
ReplyDeletegood job! thx