As a kid, I made snapshots with my mother’s inexpensive Ansco camera. I’d take the negatives to a small, sour smelling camera shop a few blocks away to be developed and made into prints. Making any sort of picture appealed to me. To encourage this, my mother bought a small set of oils for me. There were also brushes, turpentine, canvas board, paper, charcoal sticks and pencils. At age 12, I made a copy of one of Vincent van Gogh’s portraits of Augustine Roulin. It wasn’t until graduate school, in 1965, that I bought my first 35mm camera (a Nikon), and began to use photography to make pictures. After graduating from a science high school in New York called Stuyvesant High School, I intended to study architecture. In 1960, I entered the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Art and architecture students took similar courses the first year. I switched my major to art. In the following three years I studied painting, printmaking, sculpture, drawing, calligraphy, art history, and design, while commuting back and forth to the small apartment in Brooklyn, where I lived with my mother.
After receiving my degree from Cooper Union, I worked for a few months doing paste-up and layout for an art magazine in Manhattan. In December of 1965, intending to major in printmaking, I entered Pratt Institute. However, in my firstsemester at Pratt, in addition to painting and making prints, I took a photography course and bought a Nikon. I showed photographs for my graduate exhibition. Throughout those years all many areas of art made a strong impression and infuenced the photographs I began to make. I haven’t traveled much. I did spend a month in Tokyo, during the summer of 1975. Spent a week in Arles, in the South of France, about 30 years ago. I’ve been to Vigo, in Spain; and visited Paris twice. When I was a teenager my father lived in California, then moved to Las Vegas, where he lived for 19 years. In the 1950’s, I’d leave New York to spend summers with my father in California, or Las Vegas. These trips helped me gain perspective. I began more clearly to see and appreciate the great variety of life and opinion America offered. Manhattan was not the center of the universe.Some of the pictures I’ve made are allegories,fractured fairy tales is another way to describe them. Most are best understood as images meant to fascinate. William Hogarth’s “A Rake’s Progress,” shows us a world in eight engravings; “A Marxist View…” for example, attempts to offer a complex entertainment in one picture.My work often antagonized activist leftist critics and photographers. It satirized their politics, ideas, and approach to making pictures. But I’m not an “activist photographer” (at least as I understand what that means). American photography, circa 1965, was most often documentary, “socially concerned.” The ideas of Mao and Marx were more important to photographers than those of Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln. I’m a moderate Republican, and was once a registered Democrat. Beginning in the 1930’s, this kind of politicized activist photography was used, directly and indirectly, to promote various huge social engineering projects, and was often virulently anti-capitalist. Other approaches were not considered PHOTOGRAPHY. Through the 1960’s, photography hadn’t changed much. Photographers did not go to art school. Painters did not consider photography to be art.
Nude America
by Leslie Krims
EXHIBITION
Leslie Krims
Paris Photo 2014
From November 13 to 16, 2014
Paci Contemporary
Stand C41
Grand Palais
Avenue Winston Churchill
75008 Paris
http://www.parisphoto.com
BOOK
Leslie Krims
Photographs and texts by Leslie Krims
Publisher : Paci Contemporary
ISBN 978-88-6414-006-3
20,00€
http://www.pacicontemporary.com
INFORMATIONS
Via Trieste 48
25121 Brescia
ITALY
+39 030 2906352
[email protected]
http://www.pacicontemporary.com
