Frieze Los Angeles 2026: Larry Sultan : The Valley

Casemore Gallery and Yancey Richardson are excited to partner at Frieze LA, where they will present a solo booth of works from Larry Sultan’s iconic photo series The Valley (1998–2003). A seminal meditation on the actors, crews and built environment of the adult film industry in California’s San Fernando Valley during the 1990s and 2000s, the series has become an essential body of work on suburbia. It reveals a place and time when aspiring film stars, sex work and bucolic domesticity discreetly coexisted in Los Angeles County, and engenders a broader understanding of the elasticity of the ‘American Dream.’ This will be the first time the work has been seen in the Los Angeles area since Sultan’s 2014 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Having grown up in the San Fernando Valley, Sultan made that expanse of land and suburban development one of his recurring subjects, treating it as a wellspring of inspiration and a source of insight into the social life of America. Sultan’s photographs toggle between documentary, re-staging the spontaneous and pure construction to explore the psychological nuances of suburban life and charge the architecture of domestic space—so familiar that it is often overlooked—revealing a complex current of feeling, belief and experience ebbing just beneath the surface.

In The Valley, Sultan once again looked at the neighborhoods and homes he knew from his childhood, but this time as living backdrops for the adult film industry. Rented for the two or three days needed to make a film, the subjects of Sultan’s photographs become these suburban interiors with their personal touches and backyards full of lawn furniture as the uncanny foil for the fantasies and desires of an alternate family of cast and crew temporarily in residence. The viewer is rewarded for patiently exploring the banality of the domestic space as the main protagonist while Sultan works around the obvious action to find moments of connection within the mundane and the unexpected. As Sultan observed, “…by photographing this I’m planted squarely in the terrain of my own ambivalence—that rich and fertile field that stretches out between fascination and repulsion, desire and loss. I’m home again.”

About Larry Sultan

Larry Sultan (American photographer, b. Brooklyn, NY, 1946; d. Greenbrae, CA, 2009) was raised in California’s San Fernando Valley. His work, heavily influenced by the post-war popular culture of Los Angeles, plays with notions of documentary and staged photography and reveals the psychological nuances found in the everyday suburban landscape and family life. Acclaimed for his use of color and light, Sultan is also known for uniquely collapsing the distance between himself and his subject. His series include Swimmers (1978-82), Pictures from Home (1983-92), The Valley (2004) and Homeland (2006-2009). Sultan co-authored the ground-breaking work, Evidence (1977) with Mike Mandel. A beloved and highly influential educator, Sultan taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1978 to 1988 and served as a Distinguished Professor of Photography at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, from 1989 to 2009. 

Sultan’s work has been widely published, exhibited, and collected worldwide including Tate Modern, London; The National Gallery, London; Stedejik Museum, Amsterdam; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, NY; Los Angeles County San Francisco Museum of Art, CA; Art Institute of Chicago, IL. Sultan was the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, US Department of International Arts and Lectures Grant, National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowship. Sultan’s project Pictures from Home was developed for the stage and premiered on Broadway in 2023.

About Casemore Gallery

Founded in San Francisco in 2015, Casemore represents local and international artists and artists’ estates exploring various media with a strong emphasis on contemporary photography. Represented artists include Larry Sultan, Jim Goldberg, John Gossage, Todd Hido, Whitney Hubbs, Steve Kahn, Sean McFarland, Raymond Meeks, Sonya Rapoport, Raymond Saunders, Lindsey White, Suné Woods and Kanoa Zimmerman. The gallery has placed work in major museums and private collections worldwide, supporting the legacies of historically significant estates while advancing the careers of the current generation of artists.

About Yancey Richardson Gallery
Founded in 1995, Yancey Richardson represents artists working in photography, film and lens-based media. The gallery is committed to working with museums, private institutions, leading art collectors and colleague galleries to advance the careers of the artists we represent. Our current program includes emerging photographers as well as critically recognized, mid-career artists such as John Divola, Mitch Epstein, Ori Gersht, Anthony Hernandez, Laura Letinsky, Andrew Moore, Zanele Muholi, Mickalene Thomas and Hellen van Meene. Additionally, the gallery has presented exhibitions of historically significant figures such as Lewis Baltz, William Eggleston, Ed Ruscha, August Sander and Larry Sultan.

Gallery artists have been extensively collected and exhibited by museums worldwide including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Getty Museum, Centre George Pompidou, Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Stedelijk Museum, Tate Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Gallery artists have been widely published in artist monographs, prominent art journals, and critical texts and reviews of the gallery’s exhibitions have appeared in Art News, Art in America, Artforum, Modern Painters, The Nation, New York Times and the New Yorker among many other publications. Yancey Richardson serves on the board  of the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) and is a member of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers.