Kassidy Powell- Larry Sultan's "Woman in Curlers"

This is my favorite photograph by Larry Sultan because the shadows within the woman's eyes make her look as though she's weary. The more I look at the picture, the more I want to know what she's thinking and where she's going. The way her eyes are opened she looks powerful, confident, but also sad. I like the way the shadow of her face is over the side of her neck as well as the slight shadow that covers her face. It makes her look so much more ominous. I went through both books that I checked out from the library (Larry Sultan's Here and Home and Walter Pfeiffer's Night and Day) Even though both books had very different moods, the look of this woman's face drew me in and I kept coming back through Sultan's book and pausing at her picture. The amount of power that's held in her eyes is something that I want to be able to create either in my own self portrait or in a portrait of another person. Another thing that really stuck out to me about this portrait is that the woman is so calm about getting her picture taken, and yet there's something in the tilt of her chin and the creases of her cheeks that make me feel as though I'm not worthy to look at her picture or from the photographer's perspective, take the picture itself. I like that her head floats almost in the frame because of her white shirt on a white background. I think it really adds to her idea of power or of being some type of queen because it shows that she’s so far above everyone else that she can float.  

Overall going through Sultan’s book surprised me by how much I liked the depth of his photographs. The more that I looked through the book, the more I found different photographs that surprised me by their complexity and focus. While some of the photographs were dated, they still showed something interesting and worth viewing. I liked Walter Pfeiffer’s work as well, but there was so much more depth and differences in Sultan’s work that I was more drawn to it than Pfeiffer’s. I looked through both books twice and Sultan’s collections “The Valley” and then “Pictures from Home” both stuck out to me because they seemed to be so much more sentimental and emotional than the Newsroom pictures. Something about those two collections felt as though Sultan was trying to capture his moments forever. The preface that he wrote to “Pictures from Home” talking about how he wants his parents to live forever- that really stuck out to me because it reminded me that people don’t live forever and photographs can make things look better.