For the past three years Katy Grannan has roamed the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco, photographing strangers. Her subjects are most often people whom others pass by without notice, anonymous individuals who have now been transformed by photography’s peculiar magic.
Grannan photographs her subjects in front of the type of white stucco walls that can be found anywhere. She works midday when the strong noon light, in tandem with the white walls, transforms her city streets into outdoor studios. The light is precise and indiscriminate, delineating in high-pitched detail Grannan’s hustlers, strutters, addicts and beauty queens. The timeless characters who populate Grannan’s Boulevards are a compendium of street types rendered with mesmerizing intensity, separated from their counterparts of past centuries by little more than costume or hairstyle.
Katy Grannan lives and works in Berkeley. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
Boulevard is accompanied by an illustrated catalog published by Fraenkel Gallery and Salon 94, New York. This is Katy Grannan’s third solo exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery.
Until February 19
Fraenkel Gallery
49 Geary Street
San Francisco, CA 94108
