In 2006, artist Larry Sultan (1946-2009) began a project called Homeland, near his home in Marin County, California. Although he began working two years before the economic crisis reached its height in 2008, the housing economy in California had already begun to crater and the nation was embroiled in conflict over immigration. Sultan, who had built an internationally renowned career on projects that confound the relationship between fact and fiction in photography, hired undocumented Latino day laborers to pose for him in the landscapes just beyond towns and housing developments of Marin, a suburban county of great natural beauty just north of San Francisco.

Sultan’s perspective on the hills, valleys, and waterways of Marin County is evocative of the tradition of the pastoral landscape, which artists have long used to suggest the point of perfect balance between cultivation and raw nature. Although the themes of the photographs—illegal immigration, the housing crisis, and the speed of everyday life—are somber, the images themselves suggest a form of redemption. This exhibition celebrates Sultan’s Homeland project and the Carter’s recent acquisition of Novato, one of the signature works from the series.