Katy Grannan: The Ninety Nine and The Nine (FRAENKEL GALLER)

The result of three years of work in California's Central Valley, Katy Grannan's new series The 99 features large-scale color portraits and black-and-white photographs. Grannan's recent photographs are set in the parched landscape and forgotten towns along Highway 99, including Modesto, Fresno and Bakersfield. In her intensely vivid color portraits, the artist works at midday when the sun is direct and the heat is unrelenting, presenting each individual, often simultaneously heroic and vulnerable, against stark, white backgrounds. In the black-and-white photographs, many of her subjects re-appear on Modesto's South 9th Street and along the banks of the Tuolumne River. Everyday rituals, small interactions and moments of beauty on the fringes of society are depicted in detail, conferring significance to what is often overlooked. This large-format, two-volume, slipcased monograph gathers this series for the first time.
Katy Grannan (born 1969) has published three previous monographs: Model American, The Westerns and Boulevard. Her photographs are included 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 others. Grannan lives and works in Berkeley, CA.