Larry Sultan’s photographs are widely known; Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings turns attention to the sustained writing practice that accompanied his work as an artist and teacher. Published by MACK in 2026, this 320-page volume gathers texts from journals and notebooks, including reflections on teaching and art-making, short-story drafts, dream diaries, essays, public lectures, and interviews. Many of these writings had not previously been published.

The range of forms matters. Rather than presenting a single retrospective statement, the book follows thought at different stages of resolution: private notation, imaginative experiment, pedagogical inquiry, and public explanation. Across them, recurring questions emerge around perception, uncertainty, memory, and the difficulty of beginning a project. Water appears repeatedly as both a material presence and a metaphorical force; the title comes from an early draft connected to Pictures from Home and its account of trying to find form amid continuous motion.

The writings also clarify the concerns underlying three central bodies of Sultan’s work: Pictures from Home, Evidence, made with Mike Mandel, and The Valley. Archival images are integral to this account. Marked contact sheets, outtakes, scouting photographs, examples from Sultan’s collection of found photographs, and pages from book maquettes place the prose beside the practical decisions of photographic production. The result is not simply a compilation of commentary, but a view of writing and image-making as related methods of testing, revising, and arranging ideas.

For collectors, the book deserves attention for the access it provides to Sultan’s working process across several roles—photographer, writer, educator, and collaborator. Its significance lies less in offering a definitive interpretation than in preserving the provisional materials through which an artistic practice becomes legible. Read alongside Sultan’s photographic books, it supplies a valuable connective tissue between finished series, unrealized possibilities, and the habits of thought that shaped both.