Seeing the American Dream
Yael Miller, Associate Director of Marketing, reflects on Larry Sultan’s “Untitled (Mom Posing in Front of a Green Wall)”
The first thing that draws me to Larry Sultan’s evocative photograph Untitled (Mom Posing in Front of a Green Wall), on view now in Scenes from the Collection at the Jewish Museum, is its rich visual effect. The subjects are boxed in by their surroundings: a luminous curtain, glowing white furnishings, cheerful yellow flowers, and of course, the verdant backdrop and carpeting. I love her lavender silk blouse, his tropical shirt, their matching white pants, and matching tans. Upon closer inspection, this is an image that tells the story of a couple who has fled a grim urban existence in pursuit of an idealized lifestyle — in their case, the California dream.
Irving and Jean Sultan, the couple captured in this photograph, relocated their family from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1949, when their son Larry was a young child. In a 1989 Los Angeles Times interview, Larry Sultan said:
My father bought a one-way ticket from New York in 1949 and ended up in a dream house in Sherman Oaks. It was part of the cultural myth of the ’50s about going west.
This photograph is a vignette from this life, in which its subjects project an aspirational image: glamorous, sporty, distinctively American, and bearing no identifiable trace of the Old World.
The mother’s slightly guarded expression and spry femininity complement the father’s stubborn, masculine solidity. The baseball game — America’s pastime — is on the television. Their roles appear to be traditional; she hovers, as if interrupted on her way to the kitchen to fix a tray of sandwiches and iced tea; whereas he hunches impatiently.
A closer reading of this image reveals the mother’s stance, as she lightly leans against the wall, is confident and stable, not vulnerable, or frail. It almost appears, in a sense, as though she is holding up the walls of their home.
She would have had good reason to feel this way. A few years earlier, Irving had been pushed into retirement from his job as Vice President of Sales at Schick Safety Razor Company in Los Angeles. Jean, who prided herself on her track record as a successful residential real estate broker, continued to work.
During their careers, both parents were successful. They wanted their son to succeed, too, and posed for him in countless photographs over a ten-year span. Catalyzed by Irving’s retirement, Larry chronicled his parents’ daily lives through photography, home movies, and interviews, culminating in his book Pictures from Home, first published in 1992. The look of thin patience on Jean’s face in Untitled (Mom Posing in Front of a Green Wall) might reveal her sentiment in that moment about her participation in the project.
Despite their cooperation, both parents often disagreed with the way that their son portrayed them. Larry directed them not to smile. He manipulated the moment, asking his parents to repeat motions again and again, for instance, his father’s golf swing, captured unheroically in the midst of the living room. According to the book, Irving complained that the images showed him in an inaccurately morose light, and that their situations looked “strained and artificial.” Even outside of the project, Larry’s sensibilities leaked into other depictions of his mother, to her great disapproval. He wrote:
Mom calls and tells me that the pictures I made of her for the real-estate section of the Los Angeles Times are so miserable that she refused to tell anyone that I had made them, and when asked about them she said that she had to hire some hack photographer because I was unavailable. I can hear her trying to disguise her anger, but it comes through:
“Here I am top saleswoman in the office and I’m the only one in the newspaper that doesn’t even look like a sales agent. Who would buy a house from someone who looks so severe? It doesn’t even look like me. I hate that picture.”
Even with their somber overtones, the images in Pictures from Home have an idyllic quality, and Untitled (Mom Posing in Front of a Green Wall) is no exception. Although they aren’t smiling for the camera, the photograph reveals truths about the couple, and immortalizes their relationship to their son, to each other, and to their home. It is difficult to visualize this couple in another setting, so naturally have they acclimated to this place and their life here. So when Irving had to choose between his California dream, and transferring back east for his company, he chose retirement, ending his twenty-year career at Schick.
Jean passed away eleven years after this photograph was taken. Like her high-end real estate listings over the years, her obituary was published in the Los Angeles Times. It read:
Jean will be remembered for her love of her family and her joy in their happiness. She will be missed by all who remember her elegance, her love of life and great style.
Irving’s, published in the same paper five years later, was a fitting companion to hers:
He was a towering figure to all who loved him. We carry him in our hearts. He dances amongst the stars reunited with his beloved wife, Jean.
These heartfelt tributes are unsurprising, even only in context of this singular image. Also unsurprising is the fact that neither made any mention of Jean or Irving’s family origins, or places of birth. As it would appear in their son’s photography, they had fully actualized the American Dream.
— Yael Miller, Associate Director of Marketing
Larry Sultan’s photograph Untitled (Mom Posing in Front of a Green Wall) is on view now in Scenes from the Collection at the Jewish Museum. Learn more about this work in the Jewish Museum collection online.
