San Francisco- Marin photographer Larry Sultan grew up in the San Fernando Valley, the sun-bleached, mall-to-mall suburbia north of Los Angeles that inspired Moon Zappa's satiric hit song "Valley Girl."
But the valley has a darker side: It's the center of the adult film industry, an empire with an estimated net worth exceeding $12 billion.
On its glossy surface, "Larry Sultan: The Valley," a sumptuous photography exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is a behind- the-scenes look into the daily lives of sex industry workers. With the recent uproar over Janet Jackson's exposed breast, Clear Channel's suspension of Howard Stern and the revelation that a number of porn stars have tested positive for HIV, the Sultan show has a chilling timeliness.
" 'Pornography' is such a loaded word," Sultan says during an interview at SFMOMA. "I think it's gotten really clear recently because we've seen some really serious pornography with the Iraqi prisoners, along with the graphic descriptions of what happened. It's really a time of oppression and also a time of such perversion. My work is so mild, and so much about tenderness and empathy -- there's nothing pornographic about it."
His "Valley" series began in 1998 with a photo assignment from a British magazine. When Sultan drove out from Burbank Airport to a porn location on Van Alden Street, he was hit with an unexpected wave of nostalgia that would connect him to the adult film performers for the next five years.
That first shoot took place in a house two blocks away from Sultan's high school, on a street where a girl he had had a crush on once lived.
"What was really impressive to me was how ordinary the setting was, how real it was in terms of the architecture," Sultan recalls. "That place was very much like the house I grew up in."
The next year, Sultan persuaded the editors of Vogue Homme to let him do a shoot using porn stars as fashion models, which gave him more entree into porn's secret world. "I had this magazine I could take to the (adult film) studios and say, 'This is what I do; I can get you mainstream attention,' which is what they're endlessly looking for," Sultan says. "I shot for Details, Detour and New York Times Magazine, so I was kind of a (porn) mascot. And the talent could send pictures to their parents or their kids or their ex-wives, so it legitimized them. They liked me because I wasn't just another predatory photographer. I wasn't interested in the sex; I was interested in a film within a film, finding a narrative within their narrative."
The porn shoots suited Sultan's vision of the home as a theater, a theme of an earlier project called "Pictures From Home." "These film sets really did have the metaphor of a very close-knit family," Sultan says. "People were very warm with each other. They'd be talking about child care or mutual funds or the kind of things that adults talk about. It's incredibly normal, and that contributed to my pictures in a lot of ways.
"At the same time there's this sense of intense mischief throughout the house. ... You have this intersection between the ordinary and mundane and then this very transgressive, strange set of bodies that have occupied the house for that day and have turned it inside out. But there isn't the kind of sleazy, drug-oriented abuse and sense of wounded people everywhere. I saw people working hard to make a living."
To avoid pornographic stereotypes, Sultan eschewed focusing on "women that were bionic" and "huge, buff guys" in favor of "sensitive men and sensitive women," people who would more likely be seen as suburbanites.
One of Sultan's hurdles was persuading his actors to drop their masks of overt sexuality. "Not only are they used to projecting that, but they get paid to project it," he says. "It's certainly their livelihood, but it's also become a part of their identity. For them to suspend that -- or at least relax -- that was a real challenge."
There is a painterly sensibility and wry humor throughout the "Valley" exhibition's 53 photographs, which, at 50 by 60 inches each, all but engulf the viewer. Many have small details that reveal visual puns or jarring contradictions, like the flirty, hide-and-seek Baroque vase and the phallic handle and blue tape roll in "Malibu Canyon Road," or the lace, propane tank, vibrators and children's dolls in "Child's Bedroom, Calabasas."
Almost all of the explicit shots relegate the sexual acts to inconsequential background activities glimpsed through windows, screen doors or room dividers.
"What's important to me is that they have the appearance of being documents of what goes on," Sultan says. "I like the illusion of veracity, that they look like life rather than movie stills. I don't want them to look fabricated."
While many of Sultan's images depict humane and vulnerable aspects of the adult film lifestyle, the work doesn't glamorize or gloss over the subject matter.
"I don't want to say that the pornographic industry is this harmless little thing," Sultan says. "There's a great deal of coarseness that comes over the airwaves and the Internet. They make some horrific images of sexuality, but that's not what I do. I work very hard to circumvent those images."
Sultan, who teaches at California College of the Arts, has gained increasing renown as a commercial and fashion photographer. While he continues to participate in major art shows worldwide, including the "Fashioning Fiction" exhibition currently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Sultan is still an unrecognized exile in his former hometown.
"When I go back there, I enjoy it, but the fact that I've done two bodies of work centered on L.A. that haven't been shown in L.A. is really aggravating, " he says, with a laugh. "Somehow when I left (Los Angeles), it formed a kind of black hole because I can't seem to leave it as an artist. Most of my work revolves around the valley, in some form or another. So it keeps calling me back."
"Larry Sultan: The Valley" runs through Aug. 1 at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., San Francisco;
