Katy Grannan (American, b.1969) is a portrait photographer from Arlington, MA. In 1991, she received a BA from the University of Philadelphia. She also studied at Yale University, where she graduated with an MFA in 1999. That same year, she won the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, which gave her the necessary funds to continue her work. Grannan uses her images to capture the personality of her subjects.
Many of Grannan’s pieces show the subject in an everyday situation, with the photographer focusing on background elements that create a story.
Kathleen shows a housewife standing in her kitchen; this work was part of a series of photographs for
The New York Times Magazine, which also included the pieces
Keli and
Jeff Stackhouse. Grannan often finds her subjects through newspaper ads, which she places in smaller towns and rural communities across the country. Her pieces show the vulnerable side of her subjects, such as
Keli, which highlights a young mother coming home from war. The piece led to a series of photographs on female veterans who served in Iraq. The series of photographs ran in
The New York Times Magazine in 2007.
Grannan displayed her work at several notable institutions during the 1990s and 2000s, including the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art in Lake Worth, FL; The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY; and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY. She is the author of
Model America, which Aperture released in 2005.
The Westerns, an exhibition catalogue released in 2008, is sold at several galleries run by the photographer.
Artforum,
The New York Times,
Visionaire, and
The Village Voice are among the publications that have shown her work in the past. Salon 94 and the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery in New York, as well as the San Francisco-based
Fraenkel Gallery represent the artist. Grannan lives in San Francisco, where she continues to work for notable magazines and publications.