Press

Exploring Color Photography: From Film to Pixels, Hirsch, Robert, Elsevier’s Focal Press, 2011
Remixing the Civil War, Elizabeth Young, 2011, Johns Hopkins University Press
Art in America, “Dispatches From the Brink,” Dykstra, Jean, June 2010
History as Art, Art as History; Contemporary Art and Social Studies Education, Desai, Dipti, Routledge, 2010
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, ‘Likeness’ looks at the evolution of the portrait,” Shaw, Kurt, Dec. 8, 2009
Lebanon Now, “Exploring America; How we see America, how America sees itself,” Fielder, Lucy, Dec. 7, 2009
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Mattress Factories ‘Likeness’ Reflects On Artist Visions” Thomas, Mary, Oct. 8, 2009
The New York Times, “Playing President”, Feb 16, 2009
Kultura.aktualne.cz, “Greta Pratt: Jakmile vidím vlajku, dělá se mi zle”, Turek, Pavel, 2009
Democracy in America, Creative Time, 2008
The Virginia Pilot, “Flag A Day”, Annas, June 10, 2008
The Virginia Pilot, “Greta Pratt, American Identity”, Annas, Feb, 2008
The New York Times, “At Mass MoCA, a carnival of Lost Souls and Masquerades”, Glueck, August 4, 2007
Washington Post.com, “Ten Lords-a-leaping…Nine Abraham Lincolns”, July 5, 2006
The Boston Globe, “Blast from the past”, McQuaid, Kate, June 9, 2006
Reuters, “Photographer Snaps America’s Past in Today’s Scenes”, Speigelman, Art, June 2006
Life Magazine, “Only In America” May 28, 2006
Minneapolis Star and Tribune, “On the road, with camera — and irony” April 13, 2006
Minnesota Public Radio, “Is it right to call a Lincoln Impersonator ‘Honest Abe’?” March 22, 2006
London Times, “Using History”, April, 2006
Photo Eye, “Book Citation, Using History”, March, 2006
Minneapolis Star and Tribune “Using History”, Abbe, Mary, March 17, 2006
Popular Photography, ”Greta Pratt”, Grossman, Debbie, Feb, 2006
The Rake, “Desert Island Duffel Greta Pratt”, March, 2006
Popular Photography, ”Greta Pratt”, Grossman, Debbie, Feb, 2006
Photo District News, “In Search of Innocence”, Weaver, Jennifer, May 1, 2001, pgs. 191-192.
American Photography 16, 2000
Mother Jones, “History Matters”, Sept. 1999, Klinkenborg, Verlyn
American Photography 14, 1998
SPOT, Houston Center for Photography, “Agriculture Fair”, Younger, Daniel P., summer, 1995.
American Art, “Fairs: A Fixed Point On The Turning Wheel Of Time”, Marling, Karal spring 1993.

Interviews

Friday Featured Artist: Greta Pratt, Alt Daily, May 2011
http://www.altdaily.com/features/arts/visual-arts/friday-featured-artist-greta-pratt-7.html

Interview: Greta Pratt, the john seven collection, May 2008
http://flotsamandjetpacks.com/archive7/?p=320

Greta Pratt: Nineteen Lincolns, Presented by PBA and High Museum of Art. Feb. 2007
http://forum-network.org/lecture/greta-pratt-nineteen-lincolns

Quotes

“Liberty Wavers”

“Photographer Greta Pratt’s The Wavers manages to be witty, satirical, personal, and socio-economically sympathetic, all at once. Her premise? Detail-rich, arresting portraits of the people Liberty Tax hires to wave on street corners dressed as the famous statue.”
–Anne Adams, CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS

“What impresses me most about Greta Pratt as an artist is her wide-eyed wonder at the world around her. This is not to say that her outlook is naïve or untrained; quite the contrary, she is quick to discover motifs, trends, and even entire subcultures that the ordinary view might never even notice. More important, her photo essays ask us to consider why these things are the way they are. This inquisitive quality is most striking in her latest series, Liberty, in which workers are imprisoned in low-wage, dead-end service jobs while paradoxically costumed as Liberty Enlightening the World.
–Robert Wojtowicz, author Lewis Mumford and American Modernism

Using History

“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.”
–Verlyn Klinkenborg, Mother Jones, “History Matters”

“Greta Pratt’s extraordinary photographs give us glimpses of people and places that stimulate us to think about our history, not only of the great American West, but of the nation itself.  Her point of view is delightfully antic and provocative.  We want not only to enjoy the moment of our viewing, but also to study and ponder each photograph, challenged to find its larger meaning.”
–Howard Zinn, author A People’s History of the United States

“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.”
–Rennard Strickland, Using History

“Greta Pratt spotted a brace of nine Abe Lincolns alongside their log cabin Winnebago somewhere in Kentucky not long ago…. the Abe Squad is funny. It is also disconcerting, though, because the multiple Lincolns point out two home truths. First, in America everybody is, or can be, Abe Lincoln. And second, Abe Lincoln is, or might be, just about anywhere. Real time doesn’t mean much to us in the end. We live in a perpetual present in which Abe and Elvis and Tweety Bird and Mickey Mouse — and old George Washington with funny teeth and the murderous George Armstrong Custer in his fancy duds — all coexist quite nicely. Back there.”
–Karal Ann Marling, Using History

In Search of the Corn Queen

“Greta Pratt’s extraordinary photographs capture with beautiful precision the people of rural America, by observing them with an artists’ eye at the county fairs she visited across the middle part of our country.  Every one of her images is arresting in its own way, whether of a child solemnly holding an American flag in Arkansas, or two farmers, black and white, sitting side by side in Mississippi, or twins posing in their party dresses in Tennessee, or four girls caked in mud wrestling with a pig in Wyoming. There is sometimes poignancy, sometimes joy, and always a glimpse of humanity that makes us stop and wonder.”
–Howard Zinn

“Traveling middle America’s circuit of state fairs and summer festivals, Pratt documented pageants, princesses, flags, cowboys, and Indians, Shiners, politicians, and the nuclear family…exhibiting a sharp eye for composition, detail, and expression, her photos monumentalize these small town icons even as they bring them back down to earth placing them right in the middle of the intersection between nostalgia and reality.”
–City Pages

“Pratt’s 62 photographs of midwesterners at summer fairs and festivals are wonderfully sympathetic yet sardonic as well. The young photojournalist takes an affectionate, ironic attitude toward all her subjects–kids, animals, women, men. Her pictures amuse without indulging any condescending mockery. This is solid work, highly recommended.”
–Booklist