Nine Stills from My Family's Home Movies

Editor: This is "Nine Stills from My Family's Home Movies" by Larry Sultan, created between 1985 and 1992. They’re C-prints, so photographs essentially, arranged in a grid. It’s… surprisingly melancholic for something depicting such seemingly idyllic suburban scenes. What strikes you about it? Curator: Melancholy is a perfect word. There's a sense of distance, a slight remove, isn’t there? As if we're not just viewing a family's memories, but *examining* them. The mundane elevated, the quotidian…questioned. Those shaky, washed-out colours lend such a haunting air to this work, what I describe to myself as “Ghostly Kodachrome." How do they strike you? Editor: Yeah, exactly! Like…staged nostalgia? They feel intimate but also… performative somehow. It is true: the faded, dreamlike qualities of these snapshots of familiar places or experiences—family vacations, a man cutting the grass in his backyard, playing with the kids—all leave you somewhat unnerved and detached from reality. The colours add to this impression and suggest a feeling of the "good old days.” Is this something you also notice in conceptual art of the 80s and 90s? Curator: Absolutely. It was a time of intense self-awareness, questioning the very nature of representation. Think Cindy Sherman and her constructed identities, for example. The "snapshot aesthetic" was embraced, partly as a reaction against the glossy perfection of commercial photography. It was as if these artists were saying: "Life isn't perfect, memories are flawed, and that's okay. We can make art out of these very imperfect images." I do find a fascinating commentary on the American Dream in this set of photos, with both the reality of day-to-day existence and the construction of a narrative that might not align with actual life, captured for generations through images or home movies. The truth remains elusive. Is that fair? Editor: Definitely fair! Seeing those “behind the scenes” glimpses of what looked perfect, it makes you wonder what's real and what's carefully created. I am going to leave thinking a bit about that duality and the artist’s critical approach of suburban life. Curator: Precisely! That space between what's shown and what's hidden... that’s where the real art happens. The rest, as the say, is commentary.