The strange suburban mundanity of San Fernando Valley’s porn industry

Just before the turn of the millennium, Larry Sultan and his wife Kelly Sultan took a trip to the San Fernando Valley suburb in the north of Los Angeles County, California. Larry had grown up in ​‘the Valley’, known mostly for its middle-class affluence, but was revisiting the area of his childhood on an assignment for a magazine, which was to document a day in the life of a porn director, and he brought his wife along ​“for protection”. 

Stepping inside, the setting was immediately familiar. ​“The location was blocks away from his home, on the same street as a high school girlfriend, and down the street from his high school,” Kelly recalls. ​“He walked into the house through the garage, and it smelled like his garage. There were oil stains on the cement. He felt like he was home.”

But the reality of the shoot was anything but. Large film industry standard cameras with crew, extra lighting, boom operators and producers were milling around, while clothes were piled on the floor.  ​“There was a crew inside and everything was lit, and the kitchen wasn’t being used as a kitchen,” she continues. ​“So there was this intersection between the safety, predictability and banality of the suburbs, which used as the backdrop to charge this adult film industry set, was a fascinating marriage of desire.”

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Larry was instantly intrigued by this strange clash of household mundanity and sexual fantasy. For the next few years, he regularly travelled to shoots in the San Fernando Valley – which for decades in the late 20^th century was the epicentre of the American porn industry – capturing the quiet, behind-the-scenes trappings of days on set. His resulting series, The Valley, is now revisited in a new, wide-ranging retrospective Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings.

Inside, his pictures are printed alongside writings he made while creating each of his projects. ​“Why has the Valley become the porn capital of the world?” he asks. ​“The main reason, of course, is the proximity to Hollywood, the equipment and crews and ranks of aspiring or disillusioned actors. But I always felt that there is something else at work, which has to do with the role the suburbs play as the blank screen upon which we project our desires. In this house, which for a couple of days is transformed from the home of the mundane to the home of the erotic, everything is changed.”

In classic Larry Sultan style, his photographs are filled with humour, questions and a subtle absurdity. There are actors relaxing on the lawn, crew taking a nap on the sofa, and directors discussing a frame in a boxy monitor – all set within the platonic ideal visions of middle-class domestic life. It provides a window into what happens behind off camera in the adult film industry but also holds up a mirror to American aspiration. By nature, pornography – with its beautiful people, plastic surgery enlarged sexual organs, and endless variations of kinks and desires – is a fictionalised manifestation of that American fantasy. And in the films, the sun-drenched, huge homed Californian setting is an inherent part of it. There are kitchen islands, pristinely mowed green lawns and azure blue swimming pools.

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“The event of filming creates a sexualised zone in which the gestures, rituals, and scenes of suburban domestic life take on a particular weight and density,” Larry writes. ​“The furnishings and objects in the house, which have been carefully arranged, become estranged from their intended function. The roll of paper towels on the coffee table, the bed linens in a pile by the door, the shoes under the bed all lose their mundane character and are transformed into props or the residue of unseen but very imaginable actions. Even the half-eaten pie on the kitchen counter arouses suspicion.”

Yet ultimately, Larry’s photos and writings offer a humanising lens to the people who work in the industry. Both the filmmakers behind the cameras, but also the actors themselves, whose work sees them become objectified and vessels for viewers’ pleasures and desires. Seeing them exist off camera, even for a single frame, helps shed some light on their lives as people too. Larry writes about their lunch breaks and phone calls, while interspersing his own anecdotes of growing up in the area.

“My photographs reference the artifice of pornography, but they also capture real people in their own genuine moments,” he continues. ​“For example, a man is shown standing in the kitchen, looking out the window. He happens to not have any clothes on, but for me that picture recalls a really poignant moment where, in the middle of the day, you have a cold glass of water and you look out the window and wonder, what am I doing here?”

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The photographer goes on to list the people he encountered who rented out their homes in the Valley for shoots, who stayed to watch the filming. It’s people from all walks of middle-class LA life: ​“A nuclear physicist with oily skin”, ​“A burly motorcyclist who collects delicate porcelain figurines and embroideries”, ​“A single mother with a bedroom filled with male friends waiting to watch a sex scene”, ​“An older Swedish woman who showed me pictures from her childhood”. Despite its taboos in mainstream society, desire is everywhere.

Throughout the images and text, The Valley ultimately leaves much open to interpretation. While the subject focuses ostensibly on the porn industry in his home neighbourhood of San Fernando, it’s perhaps more about domesticity, family, and the blurred lines between work and pleasure. ​“Larry wasn’t one to present a finished product and say: ​‘Look at what I’ve made,’” says Kelly. ​“His process of doubt and uncertainty were integral to his teaching, writing and his photography. What I think The Valley does is it points to vulnerability, question asking, and humanity.”

All photos from series The Valley, from Larry Sultan, Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings published by MACK.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s digital editor. Follow him on Bluesky.

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