Into the 1970’s, many curators and gallery owners did not consider photography to be art. Photography was categorized as “old paper”- a term used in the antiques trade. Only a handful of museums in the United States had collections of photography not merely incidental to their main collections. My work, and that of a few others, helped establish a new direction. What we did displaced traditionalist, activist photography. These things often happen in the world of art. It is hard to account for taste or fashion. One always pays a dear price for poking fun at the left in American culture. In a country never ravaged by totalitarians, leftist activists still control the arts and humanities in academe, which they infiltated after the revolution they attempted in the late 1960’s failed. Those academics are perennially snide, petulant, dyspeptic, cutthroat, and vindictive.
They use ad hominen attack, treating their critics as enemies in a war, seeking their annihilation. My pictures have always been better received in Europe than the U.S., though they are sometimes misunderstood in Europe as criticizing America. A more accurate assessment is that some satirize the work of a misguided, elitist group of American intellectuals and artists. Digital printing is the most liberating technological development since Gorge Eastman’s invention of roll flm. I love the control one has in creating in Photoshop. To be honest, I wasn’t a big fan of working in the darkroom, though I embraced it enthusiastically in my own idiosyncratic manner. The offset works I published from time to time were also interesting to me, but very expensive to produce. In the last ten years digital printing and printers have been perfected.
In a one-room apartment it is now possible to make giant, high resolution, archival, beautiful prints without disturbing the neighbors, which once required a four color press as large and noisy as a bus. It seemed clear to me that Marx’s revolutionary notion of workers owning the means of production had come to pass. But it was capitalism, not socialism, which made the revolution possible, making photo-quality printers a commodity. Of course, refrigeration was and is much more important than digital printing to normal people, and saves more lives.Working with nudes is nothing new; photographing one’s mother nude was. In the mid-1960s, the feminist and sexual liberation movements were beginning. As a naïve young man who had lived at home until my second year of graduate school, making my way through those interesting times was not easy. I literally began at home. Photographing my mother as my first model insured a respectful relationship to my models. This has never varied. Radical feminist activists, such as Andrea Dworkin, hated men, and often had no children. The strong bond between a simple hard working woman and her son bewildered and angered these embittered women.
My work was often attacked. I became a scapegoat for that movement. The left’s politically correct stronghold in the academic photography community in the States was, and is, The society for Photographic Education.My most recent pictures attempt to show that “texts” can hammer most any picture’s meaning into a politically useful shape. If I do this adroitly, standard disingenuous, hypocritical, absurd, and irritating leftist messages are deconstructed, their methods made transparent. It’s fun to do.
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
