In Hundreds of Sparrows: Volume One, Katy Grannan photographs the Central Valley of California—Modesto, Fresno, Bakersfield, and the agricultural expanse that contains them. The publisher frames the work as an inquiry into the seemingly ordinary and the overlooked: anonymous strangers, familiar gestures, the theatre of nowhere. Grannan’s images do not explain their subjects. They hold them in view, and what accumulates is a specific, unglamorous American place, rendered without sentimentality or contempt. The publisher calls this the other side of the American Dream, and the phrase describes the photographs rather than decorating them.
Grannan works in both still photography and film, and the Central Valley is also the setting of her debut feature, The Nine, which premiered in 2016. Volume One is not a companion to that film. It is built to stand alone, and its 48 pages and 33 four-color plates give the sequence a tautness a larger book might have dispersed. The publisher describes Volume Two as functioning independently while extending, together with the first, a deeper account of the same subjects and surroundings. Volume One therefore invites two kinds of reading at once: as a self-contained book, and as one half of a longer conversation.
As an object, the book is deliberate. Nazraeli Press issued it as a slipcased hardcover at 12 by 15 inches, in an edition of 350 numbered and signed copies. The scale gives the photographs room; the plate count keeps the edit disciplined. The slipcase and signature signal that publisher and photographer treated the book as a primary work rather than a record of one. The collector’s interest lies in that conjunction—a sustained body of work carried by a book form considered at every level: format, sequence, and edition.
Grannan’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Volume One is where that broader practice turns toward an overlooked region and holds it in view. It stands on its own, and it opens toward a second volume; together they are designed to form a deeper story about ordinary lives in a place many viewers pass without seeing.
