[The Guardian] Larry Sultan’s painterly photographs of swimmers

Larry Sultan’s painterly photographs of swimmers

Partly to confront his own primal fear of the water, the Californian photographer spent years capturing the sometimes ungainly, sometimes balletic dance of humans learning to swim

Growing up in the suburban Sherman Oaks district of Los Angeles, Larry Sultan lived close to a public swimming pool. His regular visits there were undertaken with a degree of trepidation. “I was petrified of water, of deep water, especially,” he recalled in 1980. “When I was 12, I almost drowned in the ocean. Water is the only bit of nature I know that we can’t control, that seems overwhelming when you enter it and are totally immersed in it.”

In 1974, partly as a way of confronting his own primal fear, Sultan began photographing the participants in a local swimming class for blind people. He abandoned the series soon afterwards and began working on more conceptual projects alongside Mike Mandel, whom he had met at art school in San Francisco. In 1977, the pair published Evidence, an enigmatic book of monochrome found photographs from various American technological and research institutions that is now considered a landmark of conceptual photography. It was both the apex and end point of their creative partnership.

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