Katy Grannan: Model American
Starred Review. Posed with an apparently deliberate awkwardness in living rooms and bedrooms, by rural roads and in the woods, the models in Grannan's photographs stare out with uniformly expressionless faces. But, unlike the photos for fashion magazines that Grannan also occasionally shoots, the subjects of these 75 portraits are no stylishly empty ciphers. Instead, the photographs, charged as they are with an underlying current of mystery, dramatize the unbridgeable gap between subject and observer. In the first half of the book, which covers roughly the period from 1998 to 2003, Grannan's photos are shot inside the houses of her subjects, and taken using only the most basic equipment. With a fetishistic fixation on cheap, retro interiors, these photos flirt with a porn chic look and are, at times, in danger of being suffocated by their own knowingness. When Grannan takes her photo shoots outdoors, in the more recent work that forms the book's second half, something extraordinary happens. Grannan's purposely stagey images come alive with a weird, hard-edged lyricism when shot in natural light, with a backdrop of soil, foliage, and water. There may be other artists working in the post–Cindy Sherman vein of photography that calls attention to its own theatricality (among them, Malerie Marder), but Grannan has found a thorny beauty all her own.(Oct.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.