Katy Grannan

Executed between 2008 and 2010, Katy Grannan’s celebrated series Boulevard marked the beginning of the photographer’s practice in street portraiture. The resulting images are spontaneous collaborations between the photographer and individuals she came across on Hollywood sidewalks and in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. While there are obvious visual similarities to Richard Avedon’s In the American West series, Grannan also finds in her subjects the same tough individualism that Avedon found in his, decades prior. Writer Franklin Melendez noted, '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.' (“Katy Grannan: Fraenkel Gallery,” Artforum, April 2011).

Grannan and LA-based artist Charlie White were the subject in 2012 of The Sun and Other Stars, a two-person exhibition at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which included a comprehensive display of the Boulevard series. Her photographs were also featured in an exhibition at FOAM Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam in 2015.

Large-format prints of this image are in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery and the San Jose Museum of Art.