Katy Grannan. Anonymous, LA, 2009. Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

Seth Curcio: The portraits in your new series Boulevard are striking in their simplicity. Yet, given the reductive context, each photograph speaks volumes about the subject. The physical qualities of the individual make evident their distance to the what most call the American dream. With the narrative possibilities being so strong, I wonder what are the guiding principles used to select your subjects?

Katy Grannan: It’s difficult to explain what makes someone especially interesting to me – it’s a combination of personality, spirit, and their actual, physical being.  These photographs, as you mentioned, are so reductive – photographic description and detail is virtually all there is – & hopefully physical description becomes illuminating on another, psychological level. It’s important that the photograph describes a particular subject, but it also has to speak to something much larger, so that the viewer has the sense of a shared history; they’re portraits of all of us.

SC: Its interesting that you mention photographic description and detail being all that is available to the viewer. Given the reduction of image context, light becomes an even more prominent component in this work than in earlier series and remains consistent, as each figure is illuminated on a stark white ground. This purity of light is something that is evocative of the west and California in particular. Do you view the light as a metaphor? Something that is simultaneously seductive and revealing?

KG: Yes, certainly.  It was the first thing I observed when I moved to California.  The light is so seductive and comforting, and at the same time it kills everything – nothing stays green very long – and the light can be relentless and indiscriminate.  It illuminates everything, everyone.

Boulevard installation image, Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

SC: Each of the portraits speaks to how the ideals of a particular city can physically wear on the subject. It seems that this is most evident in your portraits from LA, as the city has come to represent celebrity and wealth, while its reality is often much darker.  It seems like the vain pursuit of beauty has worn physically on many of the subjects, leaving little more than the residue of longing for an unobtainable dream. Yet, there is a persistent optimism that runs through the series.

KG: I’m glad you mentioned optimism.  I definitely did not want the series to be a parade of despair, nor am I interested in smiley happy people (family photo albums are already filled with those pictures – this has always irritated me). Each one of these photographs is like a short story and part of that narrative, of course, is the part where they’re working with me to make a photograph on the spot, right after we’ve met.  The dynamic is different every time, but it’s almost always a lot of fun.  People really get into it, and it requires a generosity and openness to be part of this process, to dance on the sidewalk in front of traffic, to wave at strangers honking.  And I love the spirit of someone like the eighty year old woman who still wears bright lipstick and eyeliner – she deserves to feel gorgeous, and she is.  Or the eighty year old man that handed me his business card that read “International Playboy.”  These are the people I want to know better.  But of course, all of our histories are complex – there is disappointment, shame, loneliness, and there’s also joy.  I want all of it to exist, messily and awkwardly, in the photographs.  Because that’s life.

SC: Have there been any personal stories shared with you by your subjects that you find particularly captivating?

KG: Yes, almost everyone shares a lot with me.  Each one is like a story from The Dubliners or Chekhov.  A few women spoke to me about having a nervous breakdown after they had kids and their husband didn’t help out, then rejected them after their breakdown.  Now they’re alone; they were never able to fully recover.  I see them as especially sensitive women – they’re not crazy or strange, they’re women who are vulnerable and sensitive and who live every day knowing their kids are out there somewhere, and these kids might never know that their moms did try, but it was just too much.

I’ve made several good friends – Nicole, Melissa, and Linda are three women that I spend a lot of time with, and whom I’ve also filmed for the past year.

Katy Grannan. Anonymous, SF, 2010. Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

SC: I understand that you have used that footage to create a video project titled The Believers, which premieres tomorrow night at 1453 Valencia St. in San Francisco. Tell me a little about the process of creating the video. How did this time-based medium effect the way that you approach the work, and how do you feel that it changes the viewer’s relationship to the subject?

KG: I’ve thought a lot about this – it was really important that the film not “explain” the photographs, or reveal the mystery or ambiguity of the photographs. The film has a relationship to the photographs but it is entirely it’s own thing.  It’s a little difficult to explain the premise of the film, but it deals with the nonlinear, disruptive nature of experience and memory.  It is all footage that I shot of several women, with existing, ambient sound and dialogue, but it is not a documentary film by any means.  I don’t like that term, anyway – “documentary” – but the film intentionally weaves different subjects together, creates relationships and confusion among all of them.  You don’t necessarily know anything biographical about the subjects – except that they’re all performing and masquerading – but it’s meant to be disjointed and to mimic the way that one person or moment reminds me of another, and experiences are recalled in entirely new ways – they’re almost reinvented, re-imagined memories.  The film also shows the way that subjects and I interact with each other – they’ll boss me around, tell me where to stand, etc – so it more directly deals with this aspect of collaboration and control.  The women in the film have big personalities and strong opinions, and I respect that.

SC: Looking back at your older bodies of work, such as The Westerns and Mystic Lake, it is apparent that your work is in dialogue with the history of portraiture, both classical and commercial.  It seems easy to place you in the lineage of Diane Arbus, given your choice of subjects, or Richard Avedon, given the reduction of context in the portraits. However, I think much of your work goes beyond this type of comparison, leaving me feeling as if it is too easy to just lump you with those photographers. Which photographers of the past do you feel best inform your practice and which contemporary artists do you look to for inspiration?

Boulevard installation image, Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

KG: I take no offense in comparisons.  I often think artists and people who write about art place way too much importance on the appearance of novelty and obtuse sound bites, but if they really did their homework they’d see relationships and historical precedents all over the place.  Arbus and Lisette Model, Robert Frank and Walker Evans, etc. are obvious examples.  No one works in a vacuum; there is precedent and dialogue in every medium and expression and those relationships can be really interesting.  (“Tradition and the Individual Talent” by T.S. Elliot should be required reading).  The uniqueness or particularity of serious work is often in more thoughtful, quieter differences – all of which have to do with our own biography, experiences, and the world that we’re faced with at any given time.

I could give you a very long list of artists whose work I admire, and an even longer list of writers and film makers that have influenced my work.  But I really like what Robert Gober said: “Whenever I give a talk about my work I am invariably asked who my influences are.  Not what my influences are, but who.. As if the gutter, misunderstandings, memories, sex, dreams, and books matter less than forebears do.  After all, in terms of influences, it is as much the guy who mugged me on Tenth Street, or my beloved dog who passed away much too early, as it was Giotto or Diane Arbus.”

Katy Grannan. Anonymous, SF, 2009. Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

SC: Boulevard is accompanied by a beautiful catalog that includes additional work not on view at Fraenkel Gallery. In the back of the book there is an amazing quote taken from the Kinks song Celluloid Heros written by Ray Davies. The lyrics contain the stanza…

“Everybody’s a dreamer and everybody’s a star
And everyone’s in show biz, it doesn’t matter who you are
And those who are successful
Be always on your guard
Success walks hand in hand with failure
Along Hollywood Boulevard”

This line really captures the feeling that your subjects could be anyone of us, at anytime. What we constitute as our reality is often much more fragile than we perceive. You made a statement that ” the viewer has the sense of a shared history; they’re portraits of all of us.” That statement, coupled with the Celluloid Heros lyrics, is really poignant. It seems that for many, the West is still synonymous with freedom and boundless opportunity. This is obviously an illusion, but has working on this project caused you to reflect on your personal relationship to California or the West in general?

KG: Sure it has.  But what’s impressed me more is that many of us still try;  we make the leap of faith; and sometimes we willfully create an alternate, perhaps even a delusional reality.  That isn”t limited to California – it’s only limited by our imagination and our circumstances.  My grandmother was the queen of alternate realities, and I think it’s what kept her alive and joyful for a very long time. She wasn’t crazy – she was imaginative and stubborn and, to paraphrase Tony Kuchner, sometimes living in the world can be unbearably ordinary.

Riding on the heels of this trend, four San Francisco galleries — John Berggruen Gallery, Fraenkel Gallery, Ratio 3 and Altman Siegel Gallery — turn over their spaces to four of their represented artists to mine their backrooms to create a collaborative exhibition.  Titled They Knew What They Wanted, this exhibition is comprised of four separate group exhibitions out of the same collection. In a similar spirit, DailyServing has invited four of our San Francisco writers to use their perspectives to discuss each of the exhibitions.

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Shannon Ebner at Altman Siegel Gallery written by Julie Henson

Lee Friedlander, Egypt (1983), Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

Among the exhibitions included in this collaboration, Shannon Ebner‘s curated project at Altman Siegel Gallery offers a nice mix of investigation and understanding. Basing her choices on work that “express their existence outside the locality of time and place,” the end result is a collection of work full of mystery and object-hood. Each work is disembodied from its individual history and is reduced to abstract physicality and strange, disconnected environments.

Installation View, Altman Siegel Gallery

Many of the works in this exhibition, like Lee Friedlander’s Egypt, quickly lose their context and dissolve into an exploration of time and timelessness. Friedlander’s photo becomes cold and detached in the context of the gallery. Hidden distantly behind Lutz Bacher’s strangely displaced, object living in the middle of the space, Sol Lewitt’s Untitled (2004) and Ed Ruscha’s Unit, give small, intimate spaces for an investigation into questions of objects and textures, flatness and environment.  The exhibition successfully reflects the elements within each piece, allowing the viewer to engage each unit separately rather than depending on a collection or historical context to inform the work. On first introduction, the space seems distant and emptied, but on further investigation, the parts really do become greater than the whole.

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Robert Bechtle at John Bergguren Gallery written by Seth Curcio

Richard Misrach, Golden Gate Bridge, 3.18.00, 4:00 pm, 2000 / Chromogenic print 20 x 24"

Predominantly a photo-realist artist, Robert Bechtle took the role of curator to participate in the exhibition They Knew What They Wanted at John Berggruen Gallery. Clearly approaching the role of curator as an artist, Bechtle selected a collection of works that operate as an extension of his own artistic practice. The most obvious unifying concept within the exhibition is form in space, manifest mostly as object in landscape. However, Bechtle has stated that the main instinct driving his selections are an exploration of the mundane in everyday life, or what the press release states as the “formality of the ordinary.”

Straight photographic works by artists Robert Adams, Lee Friedlander and Richard Misrach sit in proximity to the constructed images of artist Gregory Crewdson and Miriam Bohm. Prints of non-descriptive figures sitting by a suburban pool by artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders fall into a rather easy dialogue with Paul Wonner‘s acrylic paintings of figures in a park.

Mitzi Pederson, Untitled, 2009 Wood, silver leaf, string, and bells 127 x 11 1/2 x 2 1/2"

The exhibition exists without many surprises or profound connections, but is interestingly interrupted through the work of sculptor Mitzi Perterson and the painter Garth Weiser. The inclusion of Peterson and Weiser complicates the exhibition through abstraction. These two artists’ work are reductive and formal, but continue to engage the greater exhibition in terms of both landscape and the mundane, adding new dimension to the exhibition and requiring the viewer to actually work to extract content through context.

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Katy Grannan at Fraenkel Gallery written by Bean Gilsdorf

Katy Grannan curates a fairly straightforward exhibition of portraiture at Fraenkel Gallery, and the work in each of the three rooms implies a connection to be made or a correspondence to be understood.  In the first room, the viewer encounters Barry McGee’s Mixed Media in Fifty-Two Elements (2010), a large aggregation of framed patterns and portraits of young men tagging walls.  Frantic and almost imposing, it’s a good start to the show but is misleading as far as what’s to come, as the rest of the exhibition is much more subdued.  Across the room, Grannan has installed a collection of small, black and white “photographer unknown” portraits.  Echoing the shape of Elements, these are arranged in an oval on the wall and invite the viewer to compare the anonymity of their makers to the young men compelled to brand, tag, mark, or initial public surfaces with their monikers.

Installation view of Fraenkel Gallery, curated by Katy Grannan.

The second room contains, among other works, N.Y.C. (2006), twelve photographs of backstage scenes of fashion models by photographer Lee Friedlander.  In the opposite corner is a life-sized sculpted human figure with no head, Manuel Neri’s Untitled Standing Figure (1957).  It’s as if Grannan wants the viewer to consider the form that is all face (the model) and the faceless form (the sculpture).  The two works make for a kind of mirror gesture, conceptually reversing what makes them meaningful.  Although these two pieces might have been moved closer, the distance allows for a connection that is less facile.

In spite of the interesting juxtapositions of the first two rooms, the exhibition flattens out in the final room of the gallery.  Among more portraits is a tight grouping of animal-themed images by Charlie Harper, Peter Hujar, Garry Winogrand, Will Rogan and William Wiley.  On the adjacent wall is a portrait done by Ms. Grannan herself (Anonymous, Los Angeles (2008)).  Here, it’s difficult to discern what correlation the curator wants us to find.

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Jordan Kantor at Ratio 3 written by Aimée Reed

By far the most interesting of these four is Jordan Kantor’s installation at Ratio 3 Gallery in the Mission. Kantor’s approach, unlike the other three, was to keep the drive simple: to “hang a show from what [he] found.” In his grouping, you will find an impressive diptych of ballpoint pen on paper by Alighiero Boetti; a Chromogenic color print of broken glass from Sara VanDerBeek; and a sculptural piece from Rachel Whiteread made up of four separate pieces of stainless steel. Even more noteworthy is Kantor’s selection of photographs, the dates ranging from 1887 to 2009. There seems to be no real rhyme or reason as to why Kantor selected each photograph beyond the fact that they create a cohesive aesthetic experience.

Alighiero Boetti, "Centri di Pensiero", 1978, Ballpoint pen on paper; diptych, 40.75 x 28.75" each, Image courtesy of Ratio 3 Gallery, San Francisco

This seems to be the point of Kantor’s entire directive. His professional background consists of time spent in the curatorial department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and one can’t help but notice that it must have been time well spent. Curators today seem prone to overtly themed exhibitions in a bid to justify their existence, yet, with Kantor’s contribution to They Knew What They Wanted, he reminds the viewing audience that simply loving the works can, more often than not, work. In this sense, Kantor seems to be the only participating curator able to have the confidence to know what he wanted. And for this particular viewer, I find myself wanting more of Jordan Kantor’s POV.

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What exists between these four exhibitions is more of a premise than a revelation – leaving the viewer searching for comparisons and contrasting the work of both the artist/curators and the galleries themselves. Although we are still questioning the gallery’s delineated roles, like artist, curator, exhibition, or collection, each gallery and artist alike put together an exhibition that is a quirky example of the artist’s point of view.  Yet in this case of artist curated exhibitions, we are left with a seemingly internalized and self-reflexive group.

They Knew What They Wanted will be on view through August 13th.

Hiroshi Sugimoto Lightning Fields 128, 2009

Closing on October 31st at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco is a new exhibition of magnificent photographs by the internationally acclaimed artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. The exhibition marks a new body of work for the artist, which began last year,  entitled Lightning Fields. Included in the exhibition are several large-scale black and white photographs that the artist created by using a 400,000-volt Van De Graaff generator to apply an electrical charge directly to the film. The results are stunning patterns, for which the artist has very little to no control, which mimic massive lightning forms, fur, organic botanical matter, and even at times the patterns will take on the organic forms of an insect under a microscope.

This phenomena of electricity altering film is not new to photographers. Static electricity has been plaguing darkroom users, destroying images with unintentional electrical scars  since the beginning of the medium. Sugimoto embraces and challenges this otherwise problematic occurrence in order to push the boundaries of what photography can achieve, while also offering a nod to previous scientific and photographic discoveries made by his predecessors. When speaking about this new series of work, Sugimoto has stated “The idea of observing the effects of electrical discharges on photographic dry plates reflects my desire to re-create the major discoveries of these scientific pioneers [Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, and William Fox Talbot] in the darkroom and verify them with my own eyes.”

Installation Image, Fraenkel Gallery, 2009

Sugimoto is arguably one of the most innovative photographers of our time. He was born in Japan in 1948 and lives and works in Japan and New York. Since the 1970′s, the artist has created photographs that conceptually challenge the history and current role of the photographic image, as well as investigate ideas related to time, empiricism, and metaphysics. The artist has created many successful bodies of work over the past four decades including his Seascapes, Dioramas, Theaters, historical portraits from Madame Tussaud’s wax figures, Architecture, Colors of Shadows and Conceptual forms. Each of these series were shot in stark black and white.

The artist has exhibited in countless venues across the world and has completed solo exhibition in many major museums in the United States and Japan. Exhibitions this year include Nature of Light at the Izu Photo Museum in Mishima, Lightning Fields at Gallery Koyanagi in Tokyo, Light of Coffin at Benesse Park, Naoshima and History of History at the National Museum of Art in Osaka.