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Sue Steward's rating
Reader rating
Description: Photographic portraits exploring personal identities set against the backdrop of the American west coast.
Phone: 0845262 1618
Website: www.photonet.org.uk
Email: info@photonet.org.uk
Trains: Tube: Oxford Circus 
Real portrait: photographer Katy Grannan lets Nicole choose her own image and choreograph her own poses
The newly opened Photographers’ Gallery marks its reincarnation with an exhibition by the controversial young American photographer Katy Grannan. “The Westerns” refers to three West Coast residents living way beyond the celebrity zone, and portrayed in a series of large format colour portraits.
Two middle-aged transsexuals, Gail and Dale, and an unrelated, seemingly disturbed young woman called Nicole present themselves in neutral interiors and against sand dunes, cliff-sides and ocean walks. Grannan typically invites her subjects to choose their own image and to choreograph their poses.
Gail (stronger and physically more masculine) and Dale (possibly Albino and seemingly more vulnerable) transmit the quiet exhibitionism of confident transsexuals enjoying their shared new identities. Their chosen look is of small-town women wearing stumpy court shoes and frocks, carrying handbags and wearing incongruous, long post-Sixties West Coast hairdos. Photographed together and individually, they include Dale posing pale-skinned and naked in a quietly beautiful scene, arousing voyeuristic intrigue.
The more complex, often disturbing Nicole series, possesses a familiarity from within contemporary photography for using non-professional models to explore identity. While Gail and Dale present a carefully calculated, fixed look, Nicole’s changes as fast as light.
From playing Monroe on the beach in an ash-blonde wig, or naked and twisted in hysterical laughter in a meadow, she becomes junkie-slumped and almost undressed on the beach like someone increasingly out of control. Pregnant and half naked on a bed, she is poised for the ultimate, most convincingly “real” portrait: clean-faced and wearing a hospital robe, she is reduced to basics, holding her newborn baby, and now unsure how to pose, staring helplessly into nothingness.
The contrast between Nicole and Gail and Dale, two women in control of their lives and their sexuality, highlights Grannan’s label for them as “new pioneers”. A provocative collection, it underlines the gallery’s continuing curatorial commitment to its reputation as an international exhibition space.
Until 8 February (0845 262 1618).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
