Review: ‘Pictures from Home’ is missing a distinct artistic lens

Take a picture, it’ll last longer. This phrase transcended from sarcastic adage to artistic mission in the hands of American photographer Larry Sultan. In 1992, Sultan published “Pictures from Home,” a landmark photobook subjecting his parents, Irving and Jean, to his unrelenting camera lens. Snapping minute details of his parents’ lives, we see Irving revving up a golf swing, Jean prepping a turkey glossed in butter, both lounging in bed with newspapers and a fashion magazine. The pictures captured success, comfort and modesty — a life earned from rugged individualism and climbing the capitalist ladder. However, the text accompanying those pictures, sourced from interviews with Larry’s parents, exposed the psychological toll of ageism and anti-Semitism in striving for the American Dream. (“I had to change my name. To John Sutton. You have no idea about prejudice until you pass yourself off as somebody else,” Irving later laments.) Fascinated by this duality of reality and fiction, external and internal, writer Sharr White adapted Sultan’s project into a play of the same name. Unfortunately, the precise elements that saturate Sultan’s seminal work wash out Broadway’s “Pictures from Home.”