Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Photography, film
Website: katygrannan.com
Katy Grannan was born in 1969 in Arlington, Massachusetts, and lives and works in Berkeley, California, where she has been based since 2006. She received a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991, an MA from Harvard University in 1993, and an MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art in 1999. She is represented by Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and Salon 94 in New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, and LACMA. She has published six monographs: Model American (Aperture, 2005), The Westerns (2008), Boulevard (2011), The Ninety Nine, The Nine, and Hundreds of Sparrows. Her awards include the Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers (2004), the Aperture Emerging Artist Award (2005), and a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant. She was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and has had major solo exhibitions at LACMA, FOAM Amsterdam, MoMA, the CCA Wattis Institute, the International Center for Photography, and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
Grannan is a photographer and filmmaker whose work depicts the lives of people on the margins of American society — documenting those who are overlooked, undervalued, and powerfully present. Her practice evolves through long-term series, each rooted in a specific geography and method. Her early work in the American Northeast (Poughkeepsie Journal, Morning Call, Sugar Camp Road, Mystic Lake) began with newspaper advertisements seeking “art models,” and produced intimate, charged portraits in suburban homes. With her move to California in 2006 she began Boulevard — spontaneous street collaborations with strangers on the walls of San Francisco and Los Angeles, photographed at noon — and The 99, large-format black and white landscapes of Highway 99 through California’s Central Valley, following Dorothea Lange’s trajectory through a region where the American dream remains pure myth. Her feature-length film The Nine extended these encounters into moving image. Throughout, her work is driven by a deep ethical commitment to her subjects: she develops long-term relationships, compensates her collaborators, and resists any frame that reduces them to spectacle.
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