You have probably seen Practicing Golf Swing, a photo by Larry Sultan. It’s an image of his father, barefoot, practicing his golf swing inside his house. The daylight streams through gauzy white drawn curtains, and a small ’80s television set is on in the corner. It sums up Sultan’s work perfectly. He was a master of capturing domesticity and family life in both spontaneous and staged settings. His narrative collage style uses lush, vivid colors to tell the story. If you haven’t seen one of his pictures, you have definitely seen one that was inspired by them.

Sultan was born in Brooklyn in 1946 and moved to the San Fernando Valley three years later. This sprawling urbanized area in Los Angeles County, often referred to simply as The Valley, is bordered by mountains, in a state that Joan Didion described as a “landscape of uneasy suspension, characterized by immense bleached skies, sprawling suburban developments, and a boom mentality.” This landscape would become Sultan’s most famous subject.

Mack has recently published a new book titled Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings, the name inspired by Sultan’s reflections on starting new artistic projects: “Everything is in motion, spinning off of surfaces and slamming against shadowy forms…it seems impossible to find a break in the surface.” This book shifts the focus to Sultan’s intimate, mostly unpublished writings, drawn from his journals and notebooks, which span years of thoughts on teaching and art, half-finished short stories, dream logs, and fully realized essays. It is illustrated with marked-up contact sheets, outtakes, scouting shots, and selections from his found photo collection. Interwoven throughout are excerpts from his public talks and interviews that crystallize his ideas. You can see the connections—how Evidence, Pictures From Home, and The Valley are not separate projects but rather variations of a lifelong inquiry into performance, family, power, and the uneasy theater of American life.