PETER GRANSER: SUN CITY

Sun City, Arizona is a massive retirement community with a population of over forty thousand and should have provided plenty of creative scope for some excellent reportage photography. I was rather under whelmed though with this book by Austrian photographer Peter Granser. The first thing I noticed was how washed out the colour photos looked, as if they are all slightly underexposed, well, maybe that's what the place looks like with the sun shining all year round but the few interior shots also look underexposed.

Of the fifty-four photos in the book sixteen show expanses of exterior bungalow wall, a bit like Lewis Baltz's book 'The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California' but Baltz was able to make the mundane look interesting, the Granser wall shots look tedious. Another twenty-three images show retired folk not doing too much, though by the nature of retirement communities there are obviously plenty of activities provided but hardly any are covered and this is the basic problem with the book, it is a European photographer's perspective of a place that is filled with ninety-seven percent white American, reasonably affluent old folk (incidentally, just under a quarter of these retirees have German ancestry). There are just too few photos in the book that are worth a second look.

There is also a rather rambling photobook essay by Klaus Kleinschidt with the usual impenetrable sentences like:
'The portrait of a person is both: It is profane in that it can be seen every day, and it is sensational in that every person is unique as a phenotype, in rare moments of tension even pointing towards something beyond himself'.
Perhaps having it translated from German didn't help.