‘What the hell is going on here?” is a reasonable first reaction to this photograph by the late Larry Sultan, included in Water Over Thunder, a new collection of his writing and images. It’s just so brilliantly weird: the endless wallpaper; the pink-clad ballerinas; the bored-looking couple on the sofa; the older guy standing creepily in the doorway. That no one seems remotely interested in the long-tailed creature in the middle – a raccoon? a kinkajou? – makes it all the more fabulously uncanny.
Best known for photographing suburban Los Angeles in Pictures from Home (1992) and The Valley (2004), Sultan took this during a fashion shoot for Wallpaper* magazine in Belarus in 2006. The location, according to Sultan’s widow, Kelly, was backstage at a circus building in Minsk. As he constructed the scene, with two models on the sofa, Sultan decided they needed someone in the doorway, “so they grabbed their driver and put an overcoat on him”. The women in pink are circus performers who agreed to take part; Sultan enjoyed playing with the height discrepancy between the two. Then he asked whether the circus had an animal they could borrow. First, Sultan and his lighting assistant Keith Kleiner were shown an elephant, and then a bear, but both were far too sad-looking to include. “Larry said, ‘Do you have anything else?’” recalls Kelly, “and they said, ‘Well, we have a fox-like creature, but he’s busy.’ He said, ‘Well, could we wait until he’s free?’ And they said, ‘Sure.’ So he set up the shot with a stool for the fox-like creature, not knowing what was coming.”
The “tragically anxious little animal” that turned up was, they later learned, a coati – a raccoon-like creature native to South and Central America. Its handler had to wave a treat around to get it to sit up.
“No matter how much you work as an artist, you are never in complete control,” Sultan once wrote, in a text that could easily relate to this shot. “You never have absolute knowledge of what it is going to do. [A great photograph] is truly mysterious, and no matter how many pictures I make, I have never depleted that quality of mystery.”
Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings by Larry Sultan is published by Mack
Belarus #1, 2006, commissioned work, from Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings, (Mack, 2026). © The Estate of Larry Sultan. Courtesy of Mack.