Like an X-rated backstage pass, Larry Sultan’s photos offer a look at the porn stars, crew members, and straight-to-cable movie sets that discreetly dot the San Fernando Valley. While Sultan occasionally focuses his lens on orgiastic tangles of bodies, the behind-the-scenes iconography of location shoots is most often his subject. A black glove, rolls of paper towels, rumpled pillows—given their context, these objects become almost as sexualized as the sweaty stars themselves. The lava lamps, finely manicured grass, and discarded piles of clothes illustrate a depressingly codified construct of romance, the everyman’s idea of titillation. In Malibu Canyon Road, 2002, three men (one nude) gawk at something beyond the frame—presumably, a colleague being filmed. A naked woman drifts past them, drawing nary a glance from the trio. The sex act itself is their fetish, not the person who commits it. Sultan’s photos encapsulate a culture whose business ethos is the notion that watching is just as good as the real thing.
