Katy Grannan’s contribution to the One Picture Book series, Lion King, takes as its subject an elderly feral cat living on The Nine, the setting of the photographer’s forthcoming feature film. Nazraeli Press presents the book in a compact hardcover format: 16 pages, ten four-color plates, and one signed original photograph. The title character inhabits a stretch of California’s Central Valley where, in the publisher’s language, the American Dream comes to a halt; the feral cats and dogs there are described as victims of an unforgiving landscape and as silent witnesses to human desperation and neglect.
Grannan is known for portraits that hold their subjects at a deliberate distance, and this sequence narrows that attention to a single animal. The publisher describes the Lion King as dying, yet still pacing, “proud and mournful.” That phrasing locates the book’s emotional register: not sentimentality, but a study of endurance and decline. The cat becomes a figure for the place itself, and the sequence asks the viewer to consider what dignity looks like when it is bound to a damaged environment.
The book’s place in the One Picture Book series is central to its character. Each volume pairs a small group of images with a signed original photograph, and this edition is no exception. The hardcover binding and modest page count make the sequence something to be handled and read in one sitting, while the signed print anchors the book as an object with a direct connection to the photographer’s hand. The result is both an artist’s book and a compact exhibition of a single sustained subject.
For collectors, Lion King offers a focused encounter with Grannan’s work at a scale that is intimate rather than monumental. It extends the concerns of her larger practice into a specific California landscape and into the life of one animal, and it does so through the material form of the photobook: sequence, repetition, and the presence of an original print. The book rewards attention to how the photographs are ordered and how the signed photograph sits alongside them.
