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The people she photographs are strangers to her, but the routes she travels...correspond curiously to her own personal road map. Her own experiences and identification with life in locales that stretch from the Hudson River Valley to Mystic Lake in Massachusetts, near her hometown, serve as a springboard to orchestrate encounters that supersede the so-called documentary impulse in photography. For a brief time, she and they become intimate strangers, mirroring each other's motivations and creating a drama that draws us in as the viewer and gives us a prominent role to play.
(Reprinted from a Greenberg Van Doren 2006 press release; Catalogue originally built in collaboration with Greenberg Van Doren Gallery.)
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Katy Grannan (b. 1969, Arlington, Massachusetts) was first recognized in 1998 for an intimate, yet awkward series of portraits of people in their homes. Her work continued with Poughkeepsie Journal, Morning Call, Sugar Camp Road, and Mystic Lake -- each series comprised of portraits of strangers whom she met through newspaper advertisements. These environmental portraits are informed by Grannan's own experience living in the American northeast, and are imbued with secrecy, desire and hidden intentions.
With her move to California in 2006, Grannan continued her portraiture pursuit photographing people she calls "new pioneers." Her subjects are Northern Californians struggling to define themselves under the scrutiny of the relentless Western sunlight. The resulting series, The Westerns, explores the uneasy relationship between fixed photographic portraiture and her subjects' mercurial identities. The photographs are replete with ambiguity and contradiction -- evidence of an invented, unknowable self, confronting inescapable photographic description.
Pursuing the "new pioneers" and the Western throughout the state, Grannan has expanded her subject matter to interesting strangers found on the streets in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Collectively known as Boulevard, these photographs were created against blank white walls of buildings in the penetrating California light. Boulevard is the subject of Grannan's most recent exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery and Salon 94, New York in 2011.
There are three monographs of her work: Model American, The Westerns, and Boulevard. Grannan's photographs are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. She currently lives and works in Berkeley, CA.
Artist's Website
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