About

Pete Grady has been making photographs since 1975, a practice that grew alongside — and was shaped by — a parallel formation in painting and drawing. At Pasadena City College and later UC Irvine, where he studied under Craig Kaufman, Tony DeLap, Peter Lodato, and Joe Soldate, he developed a painter's relationship to light, surface, and structure that has informed his photographic work ever since. He holds a BFA in Drawing from Boise State University.
His photographic education came through sustained practice and direct encounter with serious practitioners. An intensive workshop with Edmund Teske through UCLA Extension — centered on Teske's alternative darkroom practice of duotone solarization — introduced him less to a technique than to the example of a photographer for whom the medium was a vehicle for genuine and uncompromising inquiry. A five-day workshop with Cole Weston on the family property in the Carmel Highlands, involving view camera work at Point Lobos and darkroom printing in the West Coast tradition, grounded him in the craft standards that remain central to his practice. Roger Minnick sharpened his understanding of how to confront a subject and push past the obvious, while John Sexton expanded his sense of what a fine print was and the discipline required to achieve it.
Grady's technical formation began early — moving through the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Vivitar Corporation's corporate and engineering darkrooms, and Rapid Color's aerospace division, where he made color aerial and satellite prints. A long career in semiconductor photolithography followed, beginning in Southern California, moving through Silicon Valley, and ending in Boise, Idaho, where he transitioned from engineering into business development. From there he moved into freelance commercial and editorial photography, with a significant concentration in architectural work.
Running beneath all of it, at whatever intensity circumstances allowed, was a fine art practice that never stopped.
That formation is evident in his approach to printing — for Grady, the print is not a delivery mechanism for the image. It is the work.
His current practice centers on two sustained bodies of work, both rooted in the agricultural and industrial landscape of the Intermountain West and West Coast. The first is an ongoing investigation of grain elevators, silos, rail yards, and the broader fabric of agricultural and industrial structures that defined a particular organization of rural life across the region. These buildings are changing — some disappearing, others being replaced by structures of a different scale and character — and with them a particular vernacular architecture that accumulated its own unintentional formal intelligence over generations. This is not elegy. The work is concerned with what light does to form, with the geometric and compositional relationships that utilitarian construction accidentally produces, and with the quiet authority of things built to work rather than to be looked at.
The second body of work, Rising to the Surface, examines walls, doors, and building facades across the same geography — surfaces that have accumulated evidence of human intention, necessity, and time until they have become, without anyone's permission or design, objects that reward sustained aesthetic attention. A repair made from available materials, a painted advertisement peeling back through its own history, a rust stain that reads as a deliberate mark — these are the residue of anonymous authorship, and they raise questions about intention, value, and what we mean when we call something art. The work owes something to the Duchampian tradition of elevating the found object, but diverges from it in one essential respect: nobody made these gestures to be seen. Time and necessity made them visible.
Grady came of age within the Modernist tradition of West Coast photography, with its insistence on craft, formal resolution, and the integrity of the print — and has carried those standards into a practice increasingly concerned with questions of intention, authorship, and what makes something worth looking at.