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.”
