Katy Grannan

The result of three years of work in California's Central Valley, Katy Grannan's new series The 99 features large-scale color portraits and black-and-white photographs. Grannan's recent photographs are set in the parched landscape and forgotten towns along Highway 99, including Modesto, Fresno and Bakersfield. In her intensely vivid color portraits, the artist works at midday when the sun is direct and the heat is unrelenting, presenting each individual, often simultaneously heroic and vulnerable, against stark, white backgrounds. In the black-and-white photographs, many of her subjects re-appear on Modesto's South 9th Street and along the banks of the Tuolumne River. Everyday rituals, small interactions and moments of beauty on the fringes of society are depicted in detail, conferring significance to what is often overlooked. This large-format, two-volume, slipcased monograph gathers this series for the first time.
Katy Grannan (born 1969) has published three previous monographs: Model American, The Westerns and Boulevard. Her photographs are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Grannan lives and works in Berkeley, CA.

Between 2008 and 2010, photographer Katy Grannan roamed the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco, making portraits of strangers whom many of us might unattentively pass by; people whose faces, bodies, clothing and gestures comprise the subject of this magnificent oversize, slipcased monograph from Fraenkel Gallery and Salon 94. Grannan characterizes what attracts her in these subjects as “a combination of personality, spirit and their actual, physical being.” Grannan photographed her subjects in front of the white stucco walls so readily found in California, preferring a strong midday light which transforms her city streets into outdoor studios. The light in these photographs is thus both precise and indiscriminate, describing in high-pitched detail Grannan's hustlers, dreamers, outcasts, addicts and beauty queens, and delivering a powerful atmosphere of both defiant optimism and great hardship. “I want all of it to exist, messily and awkwardly, in the photographs,” she has said. Reviewing Fraenkel Gallery's 2011 exhibition of these 38 photographs for The Huffington Post, Julie Henson described them as “teeming with information about class, race, gender and community in the simplest terms . . . what Boulevard reminds us is that no one is to be forgotten, and that the photograph holds unparalleled power to uncover the lines between reality and invention, allure and disgust.”

Working with ordinary people who answered ads in local papers, posing them in their nondescript homes or unexceptional landscapes and using relatively simple equipment, Katy Grannan alchemizes these factors into extraordinary photographs. Disarming for their directness and for the provocative but casual nudity on display, her pictures capture the spirit of her subjects in the manner of Diane Arbus, but they also draw upon the artificial, posed tableaux of Gregory Crewdson and, indeed, art history. The posture of the tattooed and tanned (and nude) figure in “Mike,” a 2003 portrait which appeared in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, resembles nothing so much as the awkward repose of the desert nomad in Henri Rousseau's “Sleeping Gypsy.” In this first monograph, over half of the photographs are previously unpublished, providing a fresh depth to our understanding of this already widely known and accomplished young artist. Sitting on a dirt road in a knit bikini, standing defiantly in a corner of a cheaply paneled living room, leaning languidly against a chain-link fence, Grannan's photoraphs convey the dark side that we all have as well as the need to be recognized as unique individuals.