| Names: | Other: Gerard G. Granger
Other: Gerard Granger
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| | Dates: | 1903, 24 November - 1946, 17 June | | Born: | US, MI, Sunfield | | Died: | US |
Preparing biographies Approved biography for G.G. Granger
(Courtesy of Christian Peterson) |
Gerald G. Granger was born in Sunfield, Michigan, on November 24, 1903, and grew up in nearby Lansing. Always interested in electronics, he owned and operated amateur radio stations before and after World War I and toyed with early television devices. In 1924, he became the radio editor for the Lansing State Journal and four years later was the radio engineer for the city’s water and electric commission.
Granger was appointed head photographer of Lansing’s newspaper in 1932, where he excelled at shooting sporting events. About the same time, he also became interested in creative photography, so he joined the Lansing Camera Club and served as its president in 1935. He achieved associate status with both the Royal Photographic Society (ARPS) and the Photographic Society of America (APSA), and judged salons in Detroit and Toledo.
The American Annual of Photography reproduced Granger’s work six times between 1935 and 1944. And in 1943, it ran an article by him on composition, in which he likened photography to music and diagramed the rhythm of four of his pictures. His presence was most felt, however, on the international circuit of photographic salons. He exhibited extensively between 1933 and 1945, including in Antwerp, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Toronto. In the United States, he was successful at Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Memphis, Milwaukee, Minnesota, Philadelphia, Princeton, Rochester, and Scranton. In fact, in the 1942-43 exhibition season Granger was ranked fifth worldwide, with over 110 prints hung at forty-two salons. In 1945, the Smithsonian Institution gave him a one-person exhibition, comprised of fifty photographs.
Granger preferred modern subjects, such as transportation, factories, and moving subjects. The institute’s large print Silvered Steel, showing a tight set of metal smokestacks, is perhaps his most realized photograph. It features a low viewpoint, dramatic angles, and rich high-contrast tones that all work together to strongly suggest dynamism and speed—a modernist triumph. G. G. Granger died at St. Lawrence Hospital shortly after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage, on June 17, 1946, only forty-two years old.
Christian A. Peterson Pictorial Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Christian A. Peterson: Privately printed, 2012)
This biography is courtesy and copyright of Christian Peterson and is included here with permission.
Date last updated: 1 June 2013.
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