Sad to learn that Bay Area photographer and California College of the Arts professor Larry Sultan passed away Sunday at 63 of cancer in his Greenbrae home. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Sultan was diagnosed with sarcoma just a scant few months ago, in August.

Art watchers will remember his 2004 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “The Valley,” as an unforgettable take on the San Fernando Valley he was raised in -- now home to so much of the porn industry. Those large-scale color photographs brilliantly depicted quiet, complicit home invasions of sorts -- ordinary middle-class residences in the ‘burbs taken over as sets for sexually charged scenarios that questioned the very nature of home.

Sultan’s work was also exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Tate Modern, and during his lifetime, the artist, who earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, received five NEA grants as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.