Coney Island´s American dream of technologically engineered leisure and spectacle looks slightly forlorn through Peter Granser´s lens, which registers a mix of sweet smiles and emptiness, dry humor and melancholy that he refers to as its “wonderful morbid charm.”
If you know anything about the history of Coney Island (and the history of the eternally optimistic American dream), these photographs quietly comment on social change and on today’s character , which yesterday inevitably turns into. Coney Island was from the beginning so quintessentially American that Granser’s photographs of its twenty-first century existence still represent aspects of an American way of life. An offbeat way of life, perhaps, where past and present, dream and reality brush elbows, and sunlight and ice-cream cones merge with chain-link fences and garbage. Granser, an Austrian citizen who lives in Germany, has a keen eye for the exaggerations and absurdities that decorate the edges of American popular culture and of constructed lives in general. Granser himself says of Coney Island, “It is sometimes funny, sometimes bizarre, sometimes tragic and sometimes melancholic—just like life itself.”
Excerpt from the essay “The Democratic Paradise” by Vicki Goldberg for the book “Peter Granser – Coney Island” published by Hatje Cantz, 2006
The Coney Island work will be exhibited with a selection of the project SIGNS, that developed out of the Coney Island work and was photographed in Texas at the end of the Bush era.
With keen and objective precision, Peter Granser focuses in his color photographs, taken in Texas in 2006/2007, on the plethora of relics and signs that proliferate across the landscape and provide us with insights into the strange and contradictory state of contemporary US identity. Emptiness and stagnation dominate the atmosphere in this photo series resonant with skepticism, which in its formal qualities and motifs deliberately makes reference to the work of various American documentary photographers (Walker Evans, William Eggleston, Henry Wessel). Signs adds a new chapter to this legacy, depicting present-day Texas as an intellectually ossified realm where rigorous puritanical devoutness mixes with capitalist and patriotic interests to create a menacing brew.
Christoph Schaden
EXHIBITION
Coney Island & Signs
Festival Pluie d’Images
January 19 – March 1st, 2013
Galerie du Crédit Mutuel Arkéa
1 rue Louis Lichou
29480 Le Relecq-Kerhuon
France
EDITION
Peter Granser – Coney Island
Text by Vicki Goldberg
French/English
2006. 100 pp., 72 color ills.
28.70 x 28.70 cm
hardcover
ISBN 2-914171-24-2
€ 75,–
Peter Granser – Signs
Texts by Karen Irvine, Barry Vacker
German/English
2008. 132 pp., 99 color ills., 2 foldouts
30.20 x 30.40 cm
clothbound hardcover
ISBN 978-3-7757-2157-8
€ 40,–
