In 1978, a then 32-year-old Larry Sultan (1946-2009) was living in San Francisco when he came across a pocket-sized A5 swimming manual published by the Red Cross. Having recently started a new job teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute, as well as a new highly conceptual, collaborative venture with artist Mike Mandel, he had come to something of a crossroads in his own photographic work — but inside the pamphlet’s pages, came inspiration for his next work.
Inside the pamphlet, alongside rudimentary instructions detailing how to stay safe and help others in danger while swimming, were black-and-white photographs of people in the water, taken below its surface. Growing up, he’d had a complicated personal relationship with swimming after a near-death experience as a child. “I was petrified of water, of the deep water, especially,” Larry explained to his students in a 1980 talk at the Institute. “When I was 12, I almost drowned in the ocean. Water is the only bit of nature I know that we can’t control; that seems overwhelming when you enter it.”
But noticing a different sort of beauty in the images, and also as a chance to tackle his fears, Larry started travelling to local swimming pools in the Bay Area — namely the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, the Richmond Plunge and the Recreation Center for the Disabled — where he would dive underwater and take pictures of people. “He just had goggles, fins, a snorkel, a little underwater camera and a handheld flash,” says Kelly Sultan, Larry’s wife. “So altogether, it was a cocktail for extreme awkwardness.”
He would do so regularly until 1982, and now, over four decades since he decided to move on from the project, Larry’s photographs from the pools have been pulled from the archive and presented in a new photobook, Swimmers. Capturing different levels of swimming abilities, from the experts to the awkward beginners paddling against the flow, the pictures explore movement and athleticism in various shapes and forms. In a way, the disparity in swimming abilities is reflective of his own journey with being underwater.
“You can see it in the pictures; he began in the shallow end and was really nervous about being in the deep end, but he progressed and became more comfortable in the water — he was more able to control his breath and stay down longer,” Kelly says. “He was interested in playing with the idea of losing control in different ways, and photographing underwater created a lot of obstacles to controlling the situation.”
With light refracting through the waters in unpredictable patterns, the pictures are dynamic and completely in the moment. With turquoise waters and pastel swimming costumes, it also creates a graininess and obscurity that references the thinly brushed paintings of the 19th-century Impressionist movement in northern Europe.
Yet with the subjects’ heads hidden mostly above the surface, there’s a sensuality about the photographs — a physicality among the torsos and limbs as they paddle, stroke and flail. “He talked about how it was really a challenge for him as a male to make photographs that were beautiful and sensual,” Kelly says. “There’s a lot of photographs, men and women together, and also with babies underwater, and mums and dads helping their kids learn to swim — different kinds of familial relationships. He overtly stated how difficult it was to justify that as a male and also as an artist.”
And while he struggled to justify the pictures himself, they weren’t universally adored at the time by others either. With photography on the West Coast trending more towards the conceptual at the time — more in line with the work that he was making with Mike — his colourful, vibrant shots were not to everyone’s taste. While his work may seem impressionist in hindsight, a contemporary saw a similarly named but different quality to the work. Larry recalled one time: “I remember one critic coming up to me at an opening of Swimmers and saying, ‘I thought you were a conceptualist. You’re nothing but an expressionist’.”
While he took the sharp words to heart, he would use them as motivation for his future work. “He wasn’t unaffected by criticism,” Kelly says. “But he valued his own independence and his curiosity. I think the foundation for him becoming an artist was about questioning the norms.”
After discovering a box of home videos made by his parents during the mid-20th century, Larry would move on from his Swimmers project and end up focusing his attention towards what would become his iconic Pictures from Home series. But what he took from spending years submerged underwater, slowly flicking the shutter of his camera, would stay with him for the rest of his life. That complicated relationship he had with water had been repaired for a start. “He had conquered his fears by the 80s,” Kelly says. “You wouldn’t know it — he actually became enamoured with water, and it was a big feature for him in his daily life. He was constantly on the pursuit for the best swimming pools. But it also showed up in his work, beyond Swimmers.”
Kelly points to a taped interview with Larry and his father from the early days of working on Pictures of Home, in which he was picking out stills from a home movie that his parents made. Each picture he pulled out throughout the duration of the tape featured water in them. “I think he must have seen similarities in the graininess in home movies and underwater photography and ignited a curiosity in him.
“[Most of all] he’s a collaborator,” she continues. “Whether it’s with Mike, or his desire to be in the same situation as his subjects, or offering his parents room to critique his photographs of them — there’s a collaborative aspect to all of it.”
‘Swimmers’ by Larry Sultan is published by MACK
Credits
All images courtesy of Larry Sultan and MACK.