188 - Sultan Larry Swimmers. Mack, 2023. Between 1978 and 1982, moving away from the collaborative conceptual work for which he had become known, Larry Sultan photographed people learning to swim in public pools in San Francisco. Initially inspired by black-and-white documentary photographs he found in a Red Cross swimming manual, Sultan soon began to explore a desire to create physical, sensual, immersive, and painterly images. The resulting work is saturated with color and shaped by the unpredictable forms and serendipitous abstractions that emerge through the distorted refractions of water acting as a second lens. Often beautiful and frequently unsettling in their ambiguity, the series is crafted to create a sense of vivid sensory immersion in the fluid and uncertain atmospheres to which Sultan has been drawn.

Sultan Larry Swimmers. Mack, 2023. Between 1978 and 1982, moving away from the collaborative conceptual work for which he had become known, Larry Sultan photographed people learning to swim in public pools in San Francisco. Initially inspired by black-and-white documentary photographs he found in a Red Cross swimming manual, Sultan soon began to explore a desire to create physical, sensual, immersive, and painterly images. The resulting work is saturated with color and shaped by the unpredictable forms and serendipitous abstractions that emerge through the distorted refractions of water acting as a second lens. Often beautiful and frequently unsettling in their ambiguity, the series is crafted to create a sense of vivid sensory immersion in the fluid and uncertain atmospheres to which Sultan has been drawn. This collection features all the images from the series that Sultan himself selected and exhibited, and expands to include additional images he marked on contact sheets as well as other selections from his archives that he likely never even reviewed.