2008.1.3-2.9 @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

仅仅从网上看到几张远远的照片，但直觉地觉得这个摄影师的作品有意思，最打动我的既不是选材也不是技巧，而是她的“观念”，虽然这个词现在听来已经成了“俗套”。把被摄影者自己希望被视定的身份角色体现到镜头中，但这又不是流于表面的角色扮演或幻想(fantasy), 而是富于隐喻和潜意识的自我认同。Identity, identity, identity! 我以为在现今西方的艺术、政治圈里，身份认同是最时尚、最敏感的主题了。中国艺术里的相似题材就少很多，也不够有力，归根到底是社会结构不同，价值观不同。

觉得它的press release写的挺不错，在这儿转载一下。





[Press Release] Katy Grannan: The Westerns

3 January through 9 February 2008, Fraenkel Gallery

Grannan’s large format color portraits depict subjects the artist describes as “new pioneers, northern Californians who struggle to define themselves under the scrutiny of relentless sunlight. California serves as both a literal and metaphorical backdrop for Grannan’s new photographs. It is a mythical destination and a real end-point where sunshine illuminates both the abject and the joyful.

In The Westerns, Grannan explores the uneasy relationship between fixed photographic portraiture and her subjects’ mercurial identities. The photographs are replete with ambiguity and contradiction: they are evidence of an invented, unknowable self, confronting inescapable photographic description.

Included in The Westerns are several individuals with whom Grannan has worked for over three years.

Gail and Dale are two middle-aged transsexuals and best friends whose experience in the world is mediated by romantic escapism and willful delusion. Grannan thoroughly embraces her subjects’ vision of themselves, their interpretation of femininity, and the pleasure they derive from gender mimicry and performance. The photographs, however, also address the pair’s solitary interior lives and their deeper need to be visible.

Nicole, an elusive and complicated woman, simultaneously reinvents and destroys herself. Grannan’s shifting photographic approach mirrors Nicole’s ever-changing persona, her defiance, and her near self-annihilation. Here, Grannan questions photography’s ability to describe a complex individual with a single photographic “truth.”

All of Grannan’s subjects are like treasures, or hallucinations. They are preserved and re-presented and, in these photographs, become something other than what they were. Oscar Wilde famously stated, “Anyone who disappears can be seen in San Francisco.” In these photographs, they appear over and over again.

Katy Grannan lives and works near San Francisco. Her photographs have been exhibited in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and the 2004 Arles Photo Festival. She is a recipient of the 2004 Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers and her work is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as others.