Katy Grannan

Katy Grannan, Nicole, Potrero Hill, 2006

Katy Grannan’s most evident talent is for inspiring trust in people already eager to shed not only their clothes but whatever vestiges of dignity might remain to them. The resulting photographs have not been very good. Her latest effort is The Westerns. In it, she gives us pictures of Gail and Dale, transsexual best friends, Nicole, a woman struggling with unspecified demons, and a couple of guys, equally troubled, whom she apparently stumbled across on the beach.

Why The Westerns? Grannan, we are told, considers her subjects to be “new pioneers” struggling “to define themselves under the scrutiny of relentless sunlight” in San Francisco, “a mythical destination and a real end-point where sunshine illuminates both the abject and the joyful.” What crap. “Abject” may be apt, but the sunlight in San Francisco is never relentless, and there is no joy in any of these pictures.


Diane Arbus, Mexican Dwarf in His Hotel Room, 1970

Instead, there is only Grannan’s exploitation of her subjects’ confusion and unhappiness. The extent of that exploitation is best illustrated by reference to another woman who photographed outsiders and was accused, in her day, of exploiting them. In fact, Diane Arbus’s freaks are paragons of dignity in comparison. Some of them are even joyful. That’s because Arbus knew all along that she was one of them. Grannan is just a tourist.


Katy Grannan, Gail, Point Lobos, 2006

Thus, the illuminating comparison is not with Arbus, but with the painter Andrew Wyeth, whose sticky taste for bathos is echoed even in that peculiar and creepy pose that Grannan’s subjects so often assume. As far as I’m concerned, one Christina’s World is enough. More than enough, really.


Andrew Wyeth, Christina's World, 1948

(At Fraenkel, until Saturday; also at Greenberg Van Doren and Salon 94.)