Overview

Working with ordinary people who answered ads in local papers, posing them in their nondescript homes or unexceptional landscapes and using relatively simple equipment, Katy Grannan alchemizes these factors into extraordinary photographs. Disarming for their directness and for the provocative but casual nudity on display, her pictures capture the spirit of her subjects in the manner of Diane Arbus, but they also draw upon the artificial, posed tableaux of Gregory Crewdson and, indeed, art history. The posture of the tattooed and tanned (and nude) figure in ""Mike,"" a 2003 portrait which appeared in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, resembles nothing so much as the awkward repose of the desert nomad in Henri Rousseau's ""Sleeping Gypsy."" In this first monograph, over half of the photographs are previously unpublished, providing a fresh depth to our understanding of this already widely known and accomplished young artist. Sitting on a dirt road in a knit bikini, standing defiantly in a corner of a cheaply paneled living room, leaning languidly against a chain-link fence, Grannan's photoraphs convey the dark side that we all have as well as the need to be recognized as unique individuals.

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9781931788816

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KATY GRANNAN was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, in 1969. She received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in 1991 and her M.F.A. from Yale University in 1999. Her work has been featured in multiple group exhibitions; she was one of five photographers selected for the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Solo exhibitions of Grannan's work have been held at Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art in New York (2000 and 2003) and other galleries. She recently received the 2004 Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers, the Theater Gallery of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2004). Grannan is represented by the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York. She lives in New York City and San Francisco. JAN AVGIKOS is a contributing editor at Artforum. Her essays and reviews appear regularly in Artforum, Parkett, and Flash Art, among other international publications. She has written essays for catalogs of work by John Baldessari, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Marina Abramovic, and Cindy Sherman. She has also written extensively on contemporary artists Jack Pierson and Anna Gaskell, among others, and lectures widely on contemporary art.

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