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Katy Grannan
Boulevard
Katy Grannan

Katy Grannan. Anonymous, LA, 2008-2009
Katy Grannan’s Boulevard is a culmination of a three-year portraiture project on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles, stemming from an attraction to what she calls ‘anonymous people’ and curiosities about what it means to be seen and known.
In nearly all of Grannan’s street portraits, subjects are photographed on white wall backgrounds under the harsh light of West Coast sun. In her search for subjects, she seeks those who aren’t just willing to be photographed, but those interested in collaborating in on-the-spot posturing for the camera. And within this mode the photographer shares authorship of her work to those being authored.
The resulting works, while depicting strangers on the street, expand into larger documents of the process of discovery, visibility, and a reversal of anonymization. What Grannan asks of viewers is simply to acknowledge the Other, and to see those who are largely unseen.
Selected Works
Katy Grannan
Anonymous, Los Angeles, 2008
3 ETH
Katy Grannan
Anonymous, Los Angeles, 2009
3 ETH
Katy Grannan
Anonymous, San Francisco, 2009
3 ETH
Katy Grannan
Anonymous, Los Angeles, 2008
3 ETH
Katy Grannan
Anonymous, San Francisco, 2010
3 ETH
Katy Grannan
Anonymous, Los Angeles, 2008
3 ETH
Full Collection
Artist
Katy Grannan
1969 (USA)
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Katy Grannan is an artist based in San Francisco.
She discovered a passion for photography early in life, after her grandmother gave her a Kodak Instamatic 124. She never aspired to be an artist until she discovered Robert Frank and his indelible photographs in The Americans. This work changed her life. Grannan was first recognized for an intimate series of portraits depicting strangers she met through newspaper advertisements. Since moving to California in 2006, Grannan has explored the relationship between aspiration and delusion—where our shared desire to be of worth confronts the uneasy prospect of anonymity. Together, Boulevard and The Ninety Nine unfold as a danse macabre of society’s liminal and ignored—the “anonymous”. THE NINE, Grannan’s first feature film, is an intimate, at times disturbing, view into an America most would rather ignore. Raw, poetic, direct, and unnerving, the film is less a window into a foreign world than a distorted mirror reflecting our own, shared existence.
Grannan’s 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 many others. She’s also a long time contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and many other important publications. Grannan received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA from the Yale School of Art. There are five monographs of her work: Model American, The Westerns, Boulevard, The Nine, and The Ninety Nine.
Press + Articles
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Desert Island Photo Books: Peter Van Agtmael
The New Yorker (article)