Following a move to California in 2006, Katy Grannan embarked on an exploration of the tenuous relationship between aspiration and delusion, as well as visibility and invisibility. Grannan’s Boulevard series, which includes Anonymous, Los Angeles, marked Grannan’s first “street photography” body of work. For this series, executed between 2008 and 2010, Grannan photographed strangers she encountered on Los Angeles’ Hollywood Boulevard and in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, both once-thriving areas now plagued by social problems. Grannan’s subjects represent an urban underclass ranging from celebrity impersonators, addicts, drag queens, and outcasts. Viewed in their entirety, the series presents a compendium of a marginalized and powerless part of society.

In the present work, a Marilyn Monroe impersonator’s excessive makeup, furrowed brow, and aged skin creates a dissonance between her appearance and the “blonde bombshell” whose visage is firmly entrenched in our cultural memory. Almost forensic in its claritys , the natural light delineates every detail, such as her wrinkles and painted mole, with honest and crisp exactness. The backdrop of the white wall further centers our attention on the subject and thrusts the sitter forward with an immediacy that provokes a confrontation between the viewer and subject. Grannan explained that “I wanted to remove them from context almost like an abstraction. You didn’t need to know where they lived – it wasn't about that – it was really all about the person.” (Katy Grannan, quoted in Jonathan Griffin, “View From the Edge,” FT Magazine, May 2016, p. 7). Squinting under the intense sun, the subject appears troubled, perhaps grappling with a desire to be seen for who she truly is beneath the artifice of her cost.mes .

'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.'
– Katy Grannan

With Boulevard, Grannan continues the lineage of street and portrait photography, calling to mind historical precedents including Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, and Richard Avedon. Grannan cites Robert Frank’s The Americans as a major influence on her career. Her practice embodies Frank’s use of the camera as a vehicle for dynamic expression and social inquiry in their shared focus on an overlooked cross-section of American society. Similar to Arbus, Grannan captures people on the periphery, albeit Arbus typically shot her subjects in familiar settings — in the park, their homes, or the workplace — while Grannan exclusively used a white wall backdrop in this series, isolating her subjects from their environment.

The backdrop evokes a connection to Richard Avedon's In the American West series, as he likewise used a consistent white backdrop to emphasize the physiognomies of his rural sitters and bring their varied human foibles to the forefront. As Franklin Melendez noted in his Artforum review for the Fraenkel Gallery’s 2011 exhibition of the Boulevard series, 'It’s as though Grannan has reimagined the project [Avedon’s In The American West] for a contemporary context, trading in the western expanse for the city streets…Like Avedon, Grannan is a masterful casting agent, and the pathos and theatricality of her subjects are maximized by the liminal urban spaces in which she shoots them.' (Franklin Melendez, “Katy Grannan: Fraenkel Gallery,” Artforum, April 2011 (online)).

Both In the American West (see Lots 6 and 9) and Boulevard represent supra individual projects, where the series as a whole paints a picture of the characters that inhabit a particular region at a specific moment in t.mes . But above all, both series portray the reciprocal trust between a photographer and stranger and shine a light on the ordinary and the outsider through emotional engagement as opposed to simple journalistic documentation.