UCLA

This paper examines a series of photographs produced by American artist Larry Sultan (1946-2009) titled, Homeland. Made between 2006 and 2009—a financially tumultuous period when the collapse of the US housing market would precipitate what was known as the Great Recession—the images depict suburban landscapes populated by immigrant day laborers. In treating these sites as staged fictions, Sultan introduces visual and narrative ambiguities, which, I argue, reveal the complex underpinnings of suburbia’s social and aesthetic construction. Focusing on Creek, Santa Rosa (2009) as an exemplary work from the series, the paper traces the narrative anomalies of the picture, alongside the technical specificities of the photograph’s production, in order to present an allegorical framework through which the larger socio-economic conditions of labor and the fragile economies of home might newly be addressed.