Katy Grannan, by Katina Green

Katy Grannan is a photographer and filmmaker who was born in Arlington Massachusetts, in 1969.  She fell in love with observing the world when her grandmother gave her a camera about the age of  8 years old.  She had never aspired to be an artist, and then she game across Rober Frank and his photographs, in The Americans.  Grannan received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and Masters of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Art.  The five monographs of her work are Model American, The Westers, Boulevard, The Nine, and The Ninety Nine.

She is enthralled by the lives the individuals she describes as “anonymous people,” that live on the sides of our society in the American West.  Katy gets to know these individuals creating long term relationships with them.  The time she spends becoming closer to her subjects lead to such stunningly amazing and unsettling photographs.  She walks around with her camera exploring and photographing people who want to be photographed. 

She captures these individuals without all the extra stuff and just leaving them with what is essential.  She views her photographs like a family album, remembering each person and the what they talked about.  Katy thinks of her art of more a collaboration rather than just the artist’s idea.  She finds herself drawn to the fringes of society and the people and places that the world would rather not see and overlooked. Her project, The Westerns(2005–08), explores gender and identity performance in photographs of transsexual and transgender individuals.

“Discomfort is a really important feeling, and it might help you recognize some of your own limitations and the way you see the world. Or just the fact of other possibilities.”

and it might help you recognize some of your own limitations and the way you see the world. Or just the fact of other possibilities.” Katy Grannan

She made her first feature film called The Nine, named after a street called south 9^th street in Modesto, CA.  The images are intimate, disturbing, raw, poetic, direct, and unnerving at times; it is a window not into a foreign world but into our own shared existences.  She said she found it hard making this film at times. She would leave South 9th Street and return to her home in Burkley and wonder if she had the right to be there. She had a hard time with wanting to do more and felt guilty at times, it was difficult being there but still valued her friendships. She found that avoiding it would be to become complacent.   This film was a combined effort, a collaboration between herself and the subjects (her friends) that she made while making this film. Katy said her life becomes more interesting by getting out of her studio.   

Her works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others. She’s also a long time contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and many other important publications.