The unassuming suburban homes that hosted and inspired porn sets

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In a makeshift bedroom with vibrant purple curtains, the adult film actor Sharon Wild poses for a photograph between takes, sitting on a worn and dirty mattress, a diaphanous piece of pink fabric draped over the side where she sits. The dracaena tree in the corner is fake, and the rooms’ props — a single lamp, a brown suitcase on a rack — evoke the barest sense of setting and narrative.

It’s those mundane details of pornography sets, in both studios and rented homes across California’s San Fernando Valley, that intrigued the American photographer Larry Sultan . In the late 1990s, a shoot about the daily life of a porn star for the men’s magazine Maxim led Sultan, by chance, back to his child