Ken Graves (1942–2016) was an American photographer known for his nuanced investigations of masculinity, ritual, and performance in everyday life. A graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, Graves began his career in the Bay Area, where he developed a sharp documentary style often laced with surrealism and irony. In long-term collaboration with his wife and partner Eva Lipman, he produced richly observed black-and-white images exploring the constructed nature of identity, especially in social settings like proms, military academies, and sporting events. His work has been widely exhibited and is held in the collections of institutions including MoMA, SFMOMA, and the Getty. Graves brought a poetic, at times unsettling clarity to the theater of American life.
