"Once upon a time, in the first decades of the twentieth century, Coney Island was a democratic paradise where rich and poor alike doffed their clothes and immersed themselves in continuous pleasures of the flesh, the eyes, and the city-dweller's lust for thrills.
By the time Peter Granser came to check out the place it had reached a peculiar juncture. Efforts were already under way to renew the island. Granser trained his camera on a Coney Island in transition.
Granser allows his subjects a modicum of dignity, though they may seem silly, undeservedly pretentious, sad, even outrageous to a casual observer. His photographs take people on their own terms-and on our own terms, we humans prefer to think we are worth presenting to the world. Standing at a middle distance, both physically and emotionally, he maintains a lingering degree of the kind of neutrality that Walker Evans thought he could accomplish by refusing to treat his subjects like objects. Granser is wholly aware that the pride and imagination of certain people are as tacky and incongruous as the perplexing culture they maneuver in, but his comments, sometimes made by way of wry pairs of pictures, are delivered with calm irony, like a remark made by someone with a subtle sense of humor who changes neither his tone nor his facial expression"
– Extracts from the essay 'The Democratic Paradise' by Vicki Goldberg.
Peter Granser was born in 1971 as an austrian citizen in Hannover, Germany. He is self-educated and lives in Stuttgart. Granser established already with his first project Sun Citya significant style and developed his work over the years.
In 2019 Granser received the Kubus. Sparda Audience Award for his exhibition at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart that showed an overview of his work of the last 10 years.
Granser´s work has been exhibited amongst many others at the Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh, FOAM Amsterdam, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Photo Espana, Kunsthalle Tuebingen, MAK Museum Wien, Kunstmuseum Reutlingen/Galerie, NGBK Berlin and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.
German, English
2006.
100 pp., 72 ills.
hardcover
28.70 x 28.70 cm