Larry then said something that stopped me in my tracks: “Isn’t imagination really the final measure of intelligence?” It was the most obvious thing in the world—and revelatory—but it had never occurred to me before. He seemed always to have such observations, casually offered, as if in an afterthought, and, because of it, I always found myself learning something when I was with him.

Sultan’s images are, as he was, at once sincere and seductive, guarded and vulnerable. He was ultimately interested in our lifelong search for placement, picturing people who lost their homes (immigrants in foreign landscapes), changed their lifestyles (his own parents in their newfound retirement community), or staged domestic scenes (porn stars). Even his early work, Evidence, was about making images homeless by exiling them from their contexts

On this day in 1946, one of photo history’s greatest shooters was born: Larry Sultan, who died in 2009. In 1977, Sultan published “Evidence,” with Mike Mandel, a hugely influential conceptual photo book that consisted of reproduced images from industrial and government archives. For the rest of his career Sultan would create projects that bridged the realms of fictional and documentary photography