Greta Pratt

Pratt served as photography bureau chief of Reuters International in New York City. Her photographs have been featured in Art in America, The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker.

• Name — Greta Pratt • Field — Photography

Pratt has made a practice of documenting staged American history. Her series Nineteen Lincolns features members of the Association of Lincoln Presenters, a membership organization for Abraham Lincoln impersonators. It is intended to celebrate one of the most iconic elements of the bedrock of American history and put a quirky modern twist on it. Nineteen Lincolns has been on view in solo and group shows across the country since 2007. Her book Using History is an accurate depiction of her photographic universe, which is the intersection where American past meets American present. Pratt often uses clever juxtapositions of photos to tell her tale of how Americans incorporate their country's past to explain their attitudes to the present. Pratt's work has a clear connection with that of Martin Parr, both using hyper-saturated color to slyly capture the peculiarities of how everyday people represent themselves and their roots. In 2024, Pratt received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Pratt received her BFA in photography from the University of Minnesota and her MFA in from the State University of New York at New Paltz.

“…Everyone is trying to connect to the past but the past is always fiction. How history is told reveals much more about the people and time period that are telling it than about history itself.” “This book is a collection of photographs about history perceived, about how we look at ourselves and others, about how we recreate and reaffirm the American experience, about how we continue to live with, to rationalize, and to atone for the lingering spirit of place….Pratt's photographs help create an understanding of a special form of vernacular storytelling, of acting out and dressing up the past. History as we remember it emerges from her photographs. Perhaps it could more correctly be labeled history as we want it to be remembered or, even better, as we re-create and relive it. As the American novelist Willa Cather reminds us, "Memory is better than reality." “What Pratt catches here is not merely anachronism or irony…What you see here is the attempt by ordinary people – nonhistorians, that is – to capture history in a form that makes it locally communally tangible – history as shared terrain…There is an idea in most of these faces, though. The idea is continuity with forebears, with first principles, with a larger conception of the time horizon than everyday life usually affords."

Greta Pratt is recorded with the occupation photographer. Recorded as a citizen of United States. Established in Library of Congress under n94026570. Established in Discogs under 4180199. Established in FAST under 1516036.