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Course: The Museum of Modern Art > Unit 1
Lesson 10: Seeing Through Photographs- Seeing Through Photographs
- Nicholas Nixon | The Brown Sisters
- Hank Willis Thomas | Unbranded
- Katy Grannan | Boulevard
- Vik Muniz | Equivalents (The Museum of Modern Art)
- Marvin Heiferman | Seeing Through Photographs
- Sarah Meister | Seeing Through Photographs
- Lucas Blalock | Strawberries (Fresh Forever), Strawberries (Forever Fresh)
- David Horvitz | Mood Disorder
- Anouk Kruithof | Subconscious Travelling
- Ilit Azoulay | Shifting Degrees of Certainty
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Katy Grannan | Boulevard
Photographer Katy Grannan’s "Boulevard" marked the beginning of a lengthy series of street portraits. Curator Sarah Meister talks with Grannan about these spontaneous collaborations between the photographer and strangers met on the streets of San Francisco, Hollywood, and later throughout the Central Valley. -- Enroll in MoMA's new, free online course: http://bit.ly/1KANpxB See all films featured in "Seeing Through Photographs": http://bit.ly/1o30O85.
Want to join the conversation?
- So is she a sort of realist, trying to show people the way they really live their lives?(2 votes)
Video transcript
The photograph offers
a kind of unexpected intimacy and pushing a boundary. My hope is that you can empathize
and maybe even recognize something in someone that you might
not pay very much attention to. So will you tell a little bit about
how you get to a picture like this? I wanted to meet people
that wanted to be photographed. I didn't want to be a fly on the wall
or photograph someone from afar, and so it's always important to me
that I ask permission, and if you're interested,
then great. And then we walk around
and find a white wall, and my one direction is always
don't look at the camera because I wanted them to appear
almost as though they were unaware, to reference a kind
of street photography. Eventually, they often relax
or they're bored or aggravated. Maybe a little bit of
“Okay, are we done yet?” And then something
interesting happens, and those are almost
inevitably the best pictures. When you make a picture
that's this reductive, you take so much away,
so much context, so much potential narrative. The entirety of all this detail amounts to what makes
the strongest photograph. Do you feel like that can be,
though, almost... too much information? I mean, I hesitate to say cruel
except sort of on the spectrum of cruel and tender,
it's like... I think that we all look like that. If we were all to be photographed
with that kind of detail, this is what we look like
and this is who we are. I find the most cruel kinds
of pictures to be the covers of fashion magazines. I mean, nobody looks like that. So in my mind,
not only is this much more honest, I find this woman
incredibly beautiful, and I don't think
there's anything cruel about the lines, and what the sun has done to her face
and what that reveals about her, but also what is revealed by the fact
that she's put on eyeliner and she's put on her lipstick
and her pink... Matching her outfit, yeah. Matching coat
and there's a heart button, and that tells us so much about,
in a way, her optimism. Part of the criticism
of my work has always been, “Oh, you're
photographing poor people,” or “you're
photographing the homeless,” although that's a broad assumption. They're not celebrities,
they're not politicians. I find that when people
have a lot of power, whether it's money,
whatever kind of power, they have a lot more to lose, and so they present themselves
in a very specific light. Whereas with people
who don't have as much to lose, they are so much more
generous with themselves and so much more at ease with what some viewers
might perceive as imperfections. This is not here to make us
feel better about ourselves and the way that we see the world. It's here to hopefully
have a kind of aesthetic seduction, but then to have to confront
maybe uncomfortable truths, and what are we bringing
to this photograph? Why am I uncomfortable
confronting this person? What is it about me? And I think you have
to contend with a lot. And that to me
is a very worthwhile experience.