Katy Grannan

Many people leave New York for California to become someone else; perhaps more of them should read Joan Didion. She once described San Bernardino as “a place where little is bright or graceful, where it is routine to misplace the future and easy to start looking for it in bed.” In 2005, photographer Katy Grannan moved from New York to San Francisco, and in this pair of solo shows, she presents a trio of subjects who at once challenge and confirm Didion’s observation.

Uptown, at Greenberg Van Doren, images of Nicole, a woman with whom Grannan worked for almost three years, are distressing. Lounging in a parking lot and in bed, naked on the beach and reaching states of ecstasy in a meadow of wildflowers, Nicole is the sort of complex character we’ve all known, a self-annihilating shape-shifter whose mood changes as often as her haircut. Grannan portrays her in effervescent sunshine, flaws and all. Downtown, at Salon 94 Freemans, Grannan focuses her lens on Gail and Dale, best-friend transsexuals who pose against California’s rugged coast while wearing ghastly dresses and heavy make-up. In the past, Grannan snapped strangers in the quotidian confines of their homes, but here, her emphasis is on transformation and living on the edge.

If it’s true that Americans move west to reinvent themselves, this transition has served Grannan nicely. Her latest pictures clearly shift into new directions without sacrificing the allure that makes her work so haunting.

—Lauren O’Neill-Butler