Grannan State

Art

Photographer Katy Grannan wows at Frieze with a new series of portraits taken on California's Route 99

Katy Grannan had the art world kiss-of-death: early promise. As a graduate student at Yale, she first garnered attention 14 years ago with prints of teenagers and new mothers, casually dressed as well as naked, posed in living rooms and bedrooms of middle-class houses in towns like Poughkeepsie and Hyde Park, New York. Now, 99, her very different latest body of work features compelling portraits of hardscrabble, be-hatted men and women with weathered faces and tattooed arms and chests who live in towns along Route 99, “the spine of California,” as Grannan puts it. Dealer Jeanne Greenberg of Salon 94, with whom the 44-year-old photographer first exhibited in 1999 in a breakthrough first show, will be showing 18 of the exhilarating images at Frieze in New York. Some of them 55 inches high, they’ll roar over the art fair.

If Grannan’s initial works readily could be compared to reality television, this latest series, begun in 2008, is downright Shakespearean. These days, her penetrating portraits call to mind the sort of characters who fill the subsidiary roles in the Bard’s comedies and dramas: They all project interesting personalities.

"If Grannan’s initial works readily could be compared to reality television, this latest series, begun in 2008, is downright Shakespearean."

The men and women of towns such as Bakersfield, Modesto, Fresno and Oakland are bathed in relentless sunlight. The only props are cigarettes, hats, gloves, a boom box. You notice every wrinkle, every crease on astonishingly expressive faces, how lips are pursed, eyes cast. It’s impossible not to wonder about what these men and women are thinking, what they are looking at or who they are.

Anonymous, Oakland, CA, 2012; Anonymous, Modesto, CA, 2012

Raised in an Irish Catholic family that lived outside Boston, Grannan says that she understands what it’s like to live “close enough [to a big city] that you know that you are missing out on something.”

Photography isn’t the career path Grannan was supposed to be on. An attractive mother of three with piercing blue eyes now living in Berkeley, she had planned to become a doctor. She always had enjoyed taking photographs—as a teenager, her models were stuffed animals, Barbie dolls and her siblings—but she’d never pictured a life in the arts, partly because she had never known anyone who had one. She modestly credits “persistence and dumb luck” for her career shift and success.

After her initial post-collegiate acclaim, Grannan began to create an important body of editorial work. When her portraits illustrated articles in the New York Times Sunday Magazine as well as W magazine, she could not have been better matched with her subjects. Art critic Robert Hughes leaned vulnerably on his cane near disheveled bookshelves; video Shirin Neshat looked slightly askance at the camera.

Anonymous, Modesto, CA, 2012

But for many years, the settings in Grannan’s photographs were almost as important as the people who posed in them. You couldn’t miss the point. Their identities corresponded to faux wood paneling and the sort of couches, bedding and carpets advertised on late night television that surrounded them. Back then, Grannan explained, “I always tried to make space feel like an artificial stage-set.” Later, when she began photographing people outdoors, the elements of her landscapes were so rich and detailed even they could be distracting.

Greenberg has been in Grannan’s corner ever since they met in New Haven 14 years ago. (The influential and well-known dealer also represents artists Laurie Simmons and Lorna Simpson, among other artists, in her three NY galleries.) Greenberg, in a telephone interview, mentioned that she has always found the artist she’s represented longer than anyone else, “egoless,” an attribute that allows “people to feel comfortable with her.” She also admires that Grannan, at a time when digital manipulation is rampant, still uses only a camera and a light. With just this “simple equation,” Grannan, according to her long-time friend, has “become one of our great portrait photographers.” Indeed, in 2009, she was featured in an acclaimed exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

"These days, Grannan continues, as she once said, to work in the real world, not a studio."

These days, Grannan continues, as she once said, “to work in the real world, not a studio.” In the 99 series, Grannan took some cues from the great American photographer Dorothea Lange whose 1936 portrait of a migrant mother is one of the touchstones of the 20th century. Unlike Sherrie Levine who appropriated Lange’s image, Grannan “roughly followed Dorothea Lange’s path” when she made work for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression.

What’s changed in a century? Perhaps little. Grannan noted, in a recent email, that California’s Central Valley features communities where people do “not necessarily embrace an American optimism that tomorrow will be better than today.”